tihvavy  of  €he  t:heolo0icd  ^tmimvy 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 
PRESENTED  BY 

The  Estate  of 
ProfeFPor  Walter  M,  Rankin 


BS  2505  .C66  1898 

Cone,  Orello,  1835-1905. 

Paul 


PAUL 

THE   MAN,   THE   MISSIONARY,  AND 
THE   TEACHER 


■y^y^ 


PAUL 


THE    MAN,    THE    MISSIONARY,    AND 
THE    TEACHER 


BY 


ORELLO   CONE,    D.D. 


AUTHOR   OF   "  GOSPEI.-CRITICISM   AND    HISTORICAL   CHRISTIANITY,"    "THE 
GOSPEL  AND  ITS  EARLIEST  INTERPRETATIONS,"   ETC, 


THE    MACMILLAN    COMPANY 

LONDON :  MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Ltd. 

i; 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1898, 
By  the  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 


Nortoooli  5P"23 

J.  S.  Cushing  &  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith 

Norwood  Mass.  U.S.A. 


To 

PROFESSOR   OF  THEOLOGY   AT  THE  UNIVERSITY   OF  BERLIN 

IN   GRATEFUL   APPRECIATION   OF   AN   IMPULSE   TO   AND   HELP   IN   THE 

STUDY   OF   PAUL   RECEIVED   FROM   HIS   WRITINGS 

AND   OF   PERSONAL   KINDNESS   AND   FRIENDSHIP    EXPERIENCED 

FROM    HIM   DURING   A   RECENT   WINTER'S 

RESIDENCE   IN   BERLIN 

5rfji«  13ooit  10  ^ffEctionatelg  ©etiicatetJ 

BY   THE   AUTHOR 


PREFACE 

SINCE  the  beginning  of  serious  biblical  study  a  pro- 
found interest  has  been  felt  in  the  personality,  life, 
and  teachings  of  the  great  apostle  to  the  gentiles.  This 
interest  is  not  confined  to  Bible-students,  but  has  extended 
to  the  large  number  of  persons  who  are  attracted  by  the 
history  of  civilisation  and  of  liberty  and  by  the  study  of 
the  causes  which  have  effected  the  enfranchisement  and 
progress  of  human  thought.  Its  highest  degree  and  its 
widest  extent  are  amply  justified  both  by  the  wonderful 
character  and  genius  of  the  man  and  by  the  epoch-making 
force  of  his  thinking  and  his  religious  insight.  It  is  not  to 
be  put  to  his  credit  that  he  emancipated  Christianity  from 
Judaism.  To  have  separated  it  from  what  is  best  in  the 
Jewish  religion  and  ethics  would  have  been  to  render  it  a 
great  disservice.  That  he  liberated  it  from  bondage  to 
externalities  and  formalism,  and  gave  it  to  mankind  not 
only  as  a  doctrine,  but  also  as  a  power  of  the  Spirit  and  as 
an  ethical  life,  is  his  indefeasible  merit. 

One  of  the  most  remarkable  phenomena  of  the  history 
of  mankind  is  presented  in  the  personality  and  character 
of  this  man  who  suddenly  appeared  "as  one  born  out  of 
due  time"  with  incalculable  force  and  resistless  enthusiasm 
upon  the  field  of  primitive-Christian  activities.  Though  he 
be  called  a  man  of  God,  a  providential  man,  in  the  eminent 
sense  of  the  words,  he  must  remain  inexplicable  until  he  is 


Vlll  PREFACE 

interpreted  with  due  regard  to  his  natural  antecedents  and 
his  intellectual  and  religious  environment.  From  these  he 
could  not  free  himself.  By  the  highest  flights  of  his 
genius  he  could  not  escape  from  the  atmosphere  in  which 
his  spirit  drew  the  breath  of  life.  It  is  in  the  hope  of 
contributing  somewhat  to  such  an  interpretation  of  the 
life  and  teaching  of  the  greatest  of  the  apostles  of  Jesus 
that  this  book  has  been  written.  Aware  of  the  difficulty 
of  the  task  and  conscious  of  his  own  limitations  the  author 
craves  the  considerate  judgment  and  the  helpful  criticism 
of  his  readers. 

It  is  not  in  accordance  with  the  purpose  of  this  book, 
which  it  is  hoped  will  meet  the  wants  of  the  general 
reader  interested  in  its  subject,  as  well  as  satisfy  the 
requirements  of  the  biblical  student,  to  enter  upon  an 
elaborate  criticism  of  the  Pauline  Epistles.  The  discussion 
of  the  apostle's  teachings  has,  however,  been  based  upon 
those  writings  of  his  which  are  accepted  as  genuine  by  all 
except  a  small  minority  of  scholars.  These  six  Epistles, 
Romans,  i  and  2  Corinthians,  Galatians,  i  Thessalonians, 
and  Philippians,  not  only  contain  all  that  is  important  in 
his  teaching,  but  also  present  his  views  in  the  most  suc- 
cinct and  self-consistent  form. 

The  consideration  of  the  apostle's  missionary  work  has 
been  conducted  not  from  the  external  point  of  view  of 
Acts,  but  from  the  inward  aspect  presented  in  the  Epistles, 
which  reveal  the  internal  condition  of  the  churches,  as 
well  as  the  personality  of  the  great  teacher  and  his  de- 
meanour in  the  midst  of  the  trials  and  conflicts  incident  to 
his  work,  while  they  disclose  the  forces  which  were  operat- 
ing in  primitive  Christianity. 


PREFACE  ix 

The  frequent  reference  to  certain  doctrines  of  the 
apostle  in  the  course  of  the  book  will  not  incur  the 
criticism  of  repetition  from  any  one  who  considers  how 
intimately  his  fundamental  teachings  are  related  not  only 
to  one  another,  but  also  to  numerous  subsidiary  matters 
treated  of  in  the  Epistles. 

A  few  of  these  chapters  have  been  previously  published 
in  The  New  World  and  TJie  American  Journal  of  Theology, 
but  they  have  all  received  revision  and  additions. 

O.   C. 


CONTENTS 

PART  I.  —  THE  MAN 
CHAPTER   I 

PAGE 

Formative  Influences 3 

CHAPTER   n 
Personal  Traits 22 

CHAPTER   HI 
The  Conversion 53 

PART  11.  —  THE  MISSIONARY 

CHAPTER   IV 
The  First  Years  —  Galatia  and  the  Galatian  Epistles  .      69 

CHAPTER  V 
Philippi,  Thessalonica,  Corinth 95 

CHAPTER  VI 
Ephesus  —  Rome 128 

CHAPTER  VII 
The  Paul  of  the  Acts  and  the  Paul  of  the  Epistles    .     146 

PART  III  — THE  TEACHER 

CHAPTER  VIII 
The  Law -179 


Xll  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER    IX 

PAGE 

The  Pauline  Terms,  <' Death/'  "Life,"  and  "Salvation"     199 

CHAPTER  X 
The  Doctrine  of  Sin 218 

CHAPTER  XI 
Salvation  —  Atonement 251 

CHAPTER  XII 
The  Person  of  Christ 280 

CHAPTER   XIII 
Supernaturalism  —  The  Spirit 311 

CHAPTER  XIV 
Faith  and  Justification 342 

CHAPTER  XV 
Ethics 370 

CHAPTER  XVI 
Predestination 398 

CHAPTER   XVII 
The  Church  and  the  Sacraments 412 

CHAPTER  XVIII 
Eschatology     .        .        .        .        .        .        .        .        .        .    423 

Index  of  Subjects  and  Names 459 

Index  of  Passages  ..,.,,.,.    466 


PART    I 

THE  MAN 


PAUL,  THE  MAN,  THE  MISSIONARY, 
AND  THE  TEACHER 


CHAPTER    I 

FORMATIVE   INFLUENCES 

OF  the  early  years  of  the  great  apostle  to  the  gentiles 
we  have  unhappily  only  meagre  information.  As  to 
his  education  in  boyhood  and  youth  and  the  influences  and 
associations  amid  which  he  grew  up,  we  have  no  definite 
knowledge,  and  must  resort  to  conjectures  drawn  from 
what  we  know  of  his  situation  and  surroundings  and  of 
the  customs  of  the  time.  His  birthplace,  Tarsus,  in  Cilicia, 
the  southwest  province  of  Asia  Minor,  was  a  city  of  some 
commercial  importance,  one  of  the  chief  occupations  of 
whose  inhabitants  was  the  manufacture  of  sail-cloth  from 
the  hair  of  goats.  This  handicraft  the  young  Saul  doubt- 
less acquired  here,  and  we  may  assume  that  his  early  years 
were  occupied  with  its  pursuit.  That  he  was  of  humble 
parentage  and  under  the  necessity  of  supporting  himself 
by  his  own  labour  is  as  evident  as  it  is  that  he  did  not  think 
self-support  discreditable.  Rather  he  was  inclined  to  boast 
of  the  renunciation  of  his  right  to  be  nurtured  by  his 
churches  and  of  living  by  the  work  of  his  own  hands 
(i  Cor.  ix.  5-15  ;  i  Thess.  ii.  6,  9).  The  fact  that  it  was 
the  custom  for  Jewish  boys  to  learn  a  trade  does  not 
render  the   poverty  of    Saul's    family  improbable.      It  is 

3 


4  THE  MAN 

evident  from  his  own  declarations  that  he  was  not  a  man 
of  fortune  or  even  of  a  competency,  and  that  his  mission- 
ary travels  and  work  were  performed  under  the  conditions 
attendant  upon  extreme  indigence.  Here  in  Tarsus  the 
youthful  Saul  was  surrounded  by  the  unadulterated  cult 
of  the  rankest  heathenism.  But  the  seclusion  of  the 
Jewish  quarter,  his  education  at  home,  and  the  natural 
antipathy  of  a  Jew  to  polytheistic  rites,  must  have  pre- 
served him  from  close  contact  with  the  corrupting  in- 
fluences of  idolatrous  worship.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
is  not  improbable  that  the  impression  made  upon  his 
young  mind  by  the  moral  degradation  of  heathen  Tarsus 
was  reproduced  in  the  dark  picture  of  gejitile  vice  and 
shame  drawn  in  Rom.  i.  21-32,  just  as  the  inscription  upon 
the  pedestal  of  the  statue  of  Sardanapalus  in  a  neighbour- 
ing city  :  "  Eat,  drink,  enjoy  thyself;  the  rest  is  nothing," 
may  have  suggested  the  pessimistic  words :  *'  Let  us  eat 
and  drink,  for  to-morrow  we  die  "  (i  Cor.  xv.  32). 

The  schools  of  the  sophists,  the  rhetoricians,  and  the 
grammarians  in  Tarsus  appear  to  have  excited  disgust 
rather  than  interest  in  the  mind  of  the  young  man,  who 
later  in  life  could  speak  only  with  contempt  of  the  "dis- 
putes" and  ''the  wisdom  of  this  world"  (i  Cor.  i.  20). 
It  is  probable  accordingly  that  he  was  less  influenced  by 
Greek  culture  than  some  have  supposed,  a  strong  repug- 
nance to  which  as  degrading  and  corrupting  was  a  settled 
feeling  in  Jewish  houses.  An  education  in  the  Greek 
language  would  have  rendered  him  more  skilful  in  writing 
it  than  he  was  according  to  his  own  confession  (Gal.  vi.  11), 
and  would  have  made  it  unnecessary  for  him  to  dictate  his 
letters  to  amanuenses.  His  Greek  style  denotes  that  his 
knowledge  of  the  language  was  not  acquired  in  the  schools 
of  the  rhetoricians,  but  was  rather  such  as  a  Jew  of  the 
Dispersion,  a  Hellenist,  might  gain  from  living  in  a  com- 


FORMATIVE  INFLUENCES  5 

munity  in  which  it  was  spoken  and  from  the  reading 
of  the  Greek  translation  of  the  Old  Testament  and  the 
apocrypha.  As  to  Greek  literature  in  general,  there  is  no 
indication  in  his  writings  of  an  acquaintance  with  it.  He 
does  not  write  like  a  man  who  has  formed  his  style  upon 
Greek  models,  and  he  certainly  does  not  reason  after  the 
manner  of  a  student  of  the  Grecian  philosophers.  His 
citation  of  current  adages  from  Greek  poets  should  not  be 
adduced  as  an  evidence  of  his  familiarity  with  their  writ- 
ings. The  quotation  from  Menander,  ''  Evil  communica- 
tions corrupt  good  manners"  (i  Cor.  xv.  33),  was  probably 
in  everybody's  mouth,  and  attention  has  been  called  to 
the  circumstance  that  in  writing  it  the  apostle  ''  missed  the 
metre,"  and  thus  showed  that  he  was  not  familiar  with  the 
Greek  prosody.  Whatever  culture  he  had  was  that  of  a 
Hebrew  who  had  diligently  studied  the  literature  of  his 
own  people.  He  thought  in  Hebrew,  expressed  himself 
in  the  Hebrew  idiom,  and  his  writings  betray  throughout 
the  absence  of  the  breadth  and  refinement  of  a  cosmopolitan 
literary  training.  His  own  boast  was  that  he  was  "  of  the 
stock  of  Israel,  of  the  tribe  of  Benjamin,  a  Hebrew  of  the 
Hebrews ;  as  touching  the  law,  a  Pharisee  "  (Phil.  iii.  5), 
and  his  entire  performance  as  a  writer  makes  good  the 
boast. 

Whether  Saul  could  ever  have  become  Paul  the  apostle 
to  the  gentiles  or  not,  if  he  had  been  reared  in  a  Palestinian 
village  instead  of  in  the  commercial  centre  Tarsus,  is  a 
question  that  we  need  not  discuss.  If,  however,  we  take 
account  at  all  of  natural  causes  in  his  development,  we  may 
well  believe  that  a  youth  passed  in  Tarsus  could  not  be 
without  important  consequences  in  the  production  of  such 
a  capacity  for  dealing  with  men  as  the  apostle  displayed. 
Natural  qualifications  must  of  course  have  their  rights  ; 
but  these  do  not  come  to  their  fruitage  without  dependence 


6  THE   MAN 

upon  early  influences  and  associations.  The  impressions 
and  impulses  received  in  youth  may  contribute  to  form 
breadth  of  view  and  great  policies  in  manhood,  just  as 
they  show  themselves  in  the  writer,  while  he  cannot  tell 
how  it  happens  that  his  style  is  such  as  it  is.  The  con- 
trast has  been  pointed  out  between  the  illustrations  em- 
ployed by  Jesus  and  those  with  which  Paul  embelHshed 
his  teachings,  the  former  drawn  from  the  fields  and  gar- 
dens of  Palestine,  the  latter  from  the  Jewish  household,  the 
city,  and  the  arena.  The  difference,  however,  is  not  al- 
together due  to  education  and  environment  in  youth.  To 
Paul  was  wanting  the  poetic  soul  of  Jesus.  Tarsus  was 
surrounded  by  magnificent  natural  scenery,  and  in  his 
journeys  the  apostle  passed  where  the  most  delightful  views 
of  mountain  and  plain  must  have  been  before  him.  But 
he  does  not  appear  to  have  been  impressed  by  the  gran- 
deur and  beauty  of  nature,  and  of  close  observation  of  the 
outer  world  he  could  have  had  none,  or  he  would  not  have 
assumed  that  a  wild  olive  slip  was  grafted  upon  a  fruitful 
tree  (Rom.  xi.  17).  Who  will  say  that  his  disposition 
toward  the  gentiles,  which  made  his  mission  as  their  apos- 
tle possible,  did  not  have  its  roots  in  the  same  early  associa- 
tions and  culture  that  led  him  to  introduce  as  a  matter  of 
course  into  an  Epistle  to  one  of  his  churches  an  illustration 
from  the  Grecian  games,  which  were  an  abomination  to  the 
average  Jew } 

As  "■  a  Hebrew  of  the  Hebrews "  the  youthful  Saul 
must  have  had  in  his  father's  house  the  education  and 
training  of  the  Jewish  boy  of  pious  parentage.  An  out- 
line of  this  preeminently  religious  education  has  been 
gathered  from  Jewish  sources,  and  is  in  general  to  the 
following  purport :  *'  With  the  fifth  year  began  in  the 
house  of  the  Pharisee  the  reading  of  the  Scriptures,  and 
not  much  later  the  visiting  of  the  synagogue  on  the  three 


FORMATIVE   INFLUENCES  7 

hours  of  prayer,  which  to  the  Jews  of  the  Dispersion  sig- 
nified the  three  daily  sacrifices  in  the  temple  in  Jerusalem. 
On  Mondays,  Thursdays,  and  Saturdays,  the  reading  of 
the  law  was  listened  to.  The  scholar  gradually  grew  into 
the  school  and  into  the  office  of  a  teacher.  He  read  the 
law,  undertook  its  interpretation,  and  shared  in  the  contro- 
versies. Attendance  upon  the  catechetical  and  disputa- 
torial  exercises  and  zeal  in  copying  the  sacred  Scriptures 
completed  the  scribe."  This  was  essentially  a  biblical 
training,  by  means  of  which  the  boy  became  familiar  with 
the  text  of  the  Old  Testament,  lived  in  the  history  of  his 
race,  that  wonderful  history  of  miracles  and  providential 
guidance,  and  held  converse  with  the  great  lawgiver  and 
with  prophets  and  psalmists.  One  cannot  read  a  page  of 
Paul's  writings  without  finding  the  traces  of  such  an  educa- 
tion. So  penetrated  was  he  with  the  ideas  of  the  Old  Tes- 
tament that  he  could  not  write  on  a  doctrinal  or  religious 
theme  without  reference  to  them.  Hence  it  has  been  said 
that  he  **  judaised,"  and  that  '*  his  thinking  was  a  thinking 
in  quotations."  It  cannot,  how^ever,  but  appear  to  us  with 
our  regard  for  exact  interpretation  of  the  text  as  an  incon- 
sistency in  the  apostle  that,  holding  the  Old  Testament  to 
be  the  word  of  the  Spirit,  he  should  have  been  so  indiffer- 
ent to  the  actual  meaning  of  passages  in  it  as  to  employ 
the  incorrect  Septuagint  version  whenever  it  gave  a  sense 
better  suited  to  his  purpose  than  that  of  the  Hebrew. 

In  order,  however,  that  the  Old  Testament  should  be  one 
of  the  formative  influences  in  the  education  of  the  young 
man,  it  must  be  interpreted,  and  its  interpretation  is  itself 
an  influence  which  has  innumerable  hazards.  The  inter- 
pretation dominates  the  book,  and  subjects  it  to  its  point  of 
view  and  purpose.  Accordingly,  it  should  not  surprise  us 
to  find  that  the  Old  Testament  pure  and  simple,  that  is, 
interpreted  by  a  strict  grammatical  and  historical  method, 


8  THE  MAN 

influenced  Paul  less  than  did  the  method  of  treating  it  in 
which  he  was  reared,  or,  in  other  words,  than  the  Jewish 
theology  in  the  light  of  which  it  was  expounded  to  him. 
In  the  first  place,  it  was  a  fundamental  principle  in  this 
theology  that  the  sacred  writings  were  the  immediate  ex- 
pression of  the  divine  thought  and  will,  and  as  such  were 
to  be  regarded  as  an  infallible  authority.  Secondly,  there 
was  wanting  to  its  conception  and  treatment  of  the  Scrip- 
tures a  definite  view  of  the  relation  of  its  parts  to  one 
another,  or,  in  other  words,  an  historical  apprehension  of 
the  whole,  so  that  separate  passages  instead  of  being  inter- 
preted in  their  proper  connection  were  arbitrarily  torn  from 
it,  and  applied  according  to  the  exigencies  of  the  particular 
case  or  occasion.  The  Jewish  theologians  also  adopted 
the  allegorical  method  of  interpreting  the  Scriptures.  Pro- 
ceeding from  their  premises  of  inspiration,  they  believed 
that  every  passage  must  contain  a  profound  and  important 
sense,  and  when  the  grammatical  rendering  did  not  give 
such  a  sense,  they  made  the  passage  mean  something  else, 
or  allegorised  it.* 

This  allegorical  method  of  interpretation,  conspicuously 
represented  by  the  Alexandrian  school,  was  adopted  by 
Paul  in  conformity  with  the  ideas  of  the  time,  and  he 
makes  frequent  use  of  it  apparently  without  a  conscious- 
ness and  certainly  without  a  purpose  of  distorting  the 
Scriptures  in  order  to  make  them  subserve  his  ends. 
Wishing  to  maintain  by  a  biblical  passage  the  doctrine  that 
the  preachers  of  the  gospel  were  entitled  to  support  from 
the  churches,  he  refers  to  the  direction  in  Deut.  xxv.  4, 
that  the  ox  which  threshes  the  corn  should  not  be  muzzled, 
and  declares  that  it  was  not  written  on  account  of  the 
oxen,  since  God  does  not  care  for  them,  but  with  reference 

*  From  6XK0.  and  d^opevw^  "  to  say  other  things,"  i.e.  other  things  than  the 
literal  or  obvious  sense  conveys. 


FORMATIVE   INFLUENCES  9 

to  the  missionaries,  ''for  our  sakes  "  (i  Cor.  ix.  9,  10).  A 
sense  directly  opposed  to  that  conveyed  by  the  word  in 
the  original  Hebrew  is  imposed  upon  "  seed  "  in  Gal.  iii. 
16,  where  reference  is  made  to  the  promise  to  Abraham 
that  in  his  seed  should  all  nations  be  blessed.  In  order 
to  make  an  application  of  the  passage  to  Christ  he  says 
that  the  singular  form  of  the  word,  which  evidently  means 
the  entire  posterity  of  Abraham,  is  used,  and  that  the 
writer  did  not  mean,  "  and  to  seeds  as  of  many,  but  as  of 
one,  and  to  thy  seed,  which  is  Christ."  In  Gal.  iv.  22-27 
the  history  of  the  two  sons  of  Abraham,  Isaac  and  Ishmael, 
is  allegorised  in  the  sense  that  they  represent  the  two 
covenants,  although  in  the  original  there  is  not  the  slight- 
est hint  that  such  a  meaning  was  in  the  thought  of  the 
writer.  "  Hagar,"  he  remarks,  *'is  Mount  Sinai  in  Arabia, 
and  answereth  to  Jerusalem  which  now  is,  and  is  in 
bondage  with  her  children."  In  this  laboured  allegorising 
he  overlooks  the  fact  that  the  legislation  of  Sinai  was 
given  to  the  descendants  of  Isaac,  and  that  it  was  they 
who  were  "in  bondage"  to  the  law.  Sarah,  nevertheless, 
represents  the  "  Jerusalem  which  is  above,"  the  free 
Jerusalem,  "  which  is  the  mother  of  us  all ;  "  and  in  proof 
of  this  he  quotes  from  Isaiah  words  addressed  by  the 
prophet  to  the  new  Jerusalem  that  was  to  be  built,  as  if 
they  had  application  to  Sarah  and  her  descendants.  In 
like  manner  he  reads  into  the  account  of  Abraham's  faith, 
which  was  reckoned  to  him  for  righteousness,  the  quite 
foreign  sense  that  this  was  not  written  for  his  sake  alone, 
but  for  us  also,  "if  we  believe  on  Him  who  raised  up  our 
Lord  Jesus  from  the  dead  "  (Rom.  iv.  23  f.). 

In  this  connection  an  argument  is  constructed  to  prove 
that  the  promise  to  Abraham  was  not  to  "  his  seed  through 
the  law,"  that  is,  to  his  Jewish  descendants,  but  to  "his 
seed  through  the  righteousness  of  faith."     This   turn   is 


lO  THE   MAN 

given  to  the  passage  in  order  to  bring  the  gentiles  under 
the  promise,  and  the  proof  is  found  in  the  words  from  the 
Old  Testament,  *'  I  have  made  thee  a  father  of  many- 
nations."  This  citation  is  made  with  the  utmost  naivete ^  as 
if  the  writer  quoted  were  thinking  of  the  same  application 
which  Paul  makes  of  the  passage,  while  it  is  evident  that 
such  a  sense  was  as  remote  as  possible  from  the  intention 
of  the  former.  This  imposing  upon  a  passage  of  a  mean- 
ing remote  from  its  original  sense  cannot  be  regarded  as 
furnishing  a  proof  from  Scripture  even  on  the  presump- 
tion of  its  authority  by  any  one  who  holds  to  established 
principles  of  interpretation,  and  it  is  not  surprising  that 
Luther  thought  this  kind  of  scriptural  argument  *'too 
weak  to  hold."  But  Paul's  preoccupation  with  a  dogmatic 
purpose  led  him  to  see  in  the  Jewish  Scriptures  the  ideas 
which  filled  his  own  mind,  and  his  education  in  the 
current  theology  of  his  time  had  not  taught  him  to  read 
his  Bible  with  a  view  to  ascertaining  its  historical  sense. 
In  this  respect  he  was  as  truly  a  child  of  his  age  as  was 
Philo,  and  his  exegesis  must  be  judged  as  we  judge  that  of 
the  latter. 

To  one  who  does  not  regard  the  matter  in  this  light,  it 
is  surprising  to  find  the  apostle  proceeding  naively  to 
condemn  the  Old  Testament  doctrine  of  legal  righteous- 
ness out  of  that  collection  itself  by  bringing  different 
parts  of  it  into  conflict  with  one  another.  In  order  to 
prove,  for  example,  his  great  proposition  that  righteous- 
ness is  not  by  the  works  of  the  law,  he  quotes  Deut.  xxvii. 
26,  ''  Cursed  is  every  one  that  continueth  not  in  all  things 
which  are  written  in  the  book  of  the  law  to  do  them  "  —  a 
passage  which  evidently  implies  that  every  one  ought  to 
keep  the  law,  and  can  keep  it  if  he  will,  and  so  avoid  the 
curse.  Then  in  order  to  show  that  this  very  thing  is 
impossible,  and  that  "  no  man  is  justified  by  the  law,"  he 


FORMATIVE  INFLUENCES  II 

quotes  from  Habak.  ii.  4,  "The  just  shall  live  by  faith,"  as 
if  the  writer  of  Habakkuk  had  in  mind  precisely  the 
Pauline  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith.  Immediately  he 
adds,  "And  the  law  is  not  of  faith,"  and  again  quotes: 
"The  man  that  doeth  them  shall  live  in  them,"  that  is,  the 
man  who  keeps  the  commandments  of  the  law  shall  live  in 
them,  the  very  thing  of  which  he  is  arguing  the  impossi- 
bility (Gal.  iii.  10-12).  His  preoccupation  with  justifica- 
tion by  faith  leads  him  to  another  even  more  arbitrary 
treatment  of  an  Old  Testament  passage  (Deut.  xxx.  11-15) 
in  which  the  writer  represents  the  law  as  so  near  to  every 
man  that  he  is  inexcusable  who  does  not  observe  its 
requirements.  It  is  not  in  heaven,  that  it  should  be 
brought  down  by  a  messenger  sent  up  for  it,  and  it  is  not 
beyond  the  sea,  that  some  one  should  go  and  fetch  it,  but 
"  it  is  very  nigh  unto  thee  in  thy  mouth  and  in  thy  heart, 
that  thou  shouldst  keep  it."  The  doctrine  of  righteousness 
by  works,  which  Paul  vehemently  repudiated,  could  not  be 
more  explicitly  declared  than  it  is  here.  Yet  he  interprets 
the  passage  to  a  directly  opposite  intent,  by  putting  the 
words  of  Deuteronomy  into  the  mouth  of  Righteousness 
by  faith  personified  and  referring  them  to  Christ  instead 
of  to  the  law :  "  But  the  Righteousness  which  is  by  faith 
speaketh  in  this  wise,  Say  not  in  thine  heart,  who  shall 
ascend  into  heaven  (that  is,  to  bring  Christ  down  from 
above),  or  who  shall  descend  into  the  deep  (that  is,  to 
bring  Christ  up  from  the  dead).  But  what  saith  it }  The 
word  is  nigh  thee,  even  in  thy  mouth  and  in  thy  heart." 
This  "word,"  however,  is  not  the  word  of  the  law,  as  in 
Deuteronomy,  but  with  a  most  astonishing  simplicity  the 
apostle  adds,  "that  is,  the  word  of  faith  which  we  preach" 
(Rom.  xi.  6-%\ 

Paul  also  learned  from  his  Jewish  teachers  the  interpre- 
tation known  as  the  typological,  the  principle  of  which  is 


12  THE  MAN 

that  events  and  persons  of  a  past  time  may  be  regarded 
as  prefiguring  occurrences  and  individuals  of  a  later  age. 
It  is  evident  that  if  this  method  of  interpretation  has  any 
validity  at  all,  it  must  be  because  the  earlier  historian  or 
biographer  was  conscious  of  the  relation  of  the  historical 
incidents  and  personages  of  his  record  to  the  future,  and 
definitely  indicated  that  relation.  This  alone  could  furnish 
a  check  upon  the  arbitrary  reference  of  any  event  or  per- 
sonality in  the  past  to  any  subsequent  occurrences  under 
the  relation  of  type  and  antitype.  The  fact,  however,  is 
that  the  typological  interpretation,  as  it  was  practised  by 
the  ancients,  was  entirely  without  such  a  restraint,  and  was 
accordingly  fanciful  and  wholly  unsound,  unless  one  is 
willing  to  adopt  the  presumption  that  the  writers  who 
employed  it  were  infallibly  inspired,  and  thus  qualified  to 
discern  in  the  history  of  the  past  relations  and  profound 
meanings  which  the  authors  of  that  history  give  no  intima- 
tion of  having  intended  to  convey.  But  there  is  no  need 
to  resort  to  a  supernatural  explanation  of  typology,  since 
an  historical  account  of  its  origin  is  at  hand.  It  was  doubt- 
less an  adaptation  by  the  Hellenistic  Jews,  that  is,  the  Jews 
whose  thought  was  influenced  by  Greek  ideas,  from  the 
Platonic  doctrine  of  idea  and  type,  and  was  extensively 
employed  by  Philo,  the  Alexandrian  Hellenist,  to  whom 
the  entire  Old  Testament  history  was  full  of  types  whose 
antitypes  he  had  no  difficulty  in  finding.  The  writer  of 
Hebrews,  in  whom  the  Hellenistic  influence  is  more  con- 
spicuous than  in  Paul,  finds  in  Melchisedec  a  type  of 
Christ  and  in  the  Jewish  sacrifices  the  *'  shadow  of  heav- 
enly things."  For  to  him  '*  Christ  did  not  enter  into  the 
holy  places  made  with  hands,  which  are  a  figure  of  the 
true,  but  into  heaven  itself,  now  to  appear  in  the  presence 
of  God  for  us."  *     In  like  manner  Paul  interprets  the  his- 

*  Heb.  V.  6,  vi.  20,  viii.  5,  ix.  24. 


FORMATIVE   INFLUENCES  1 3 

tory  of  the  Israelites  in  the  wilderness.  They  were  all 
baptized  unto  Moses  in  the  cloud  and  in  the  sea,  ate  the 
spiritual  food,  drank  the  spiritual  drink  of  the  spiritual 
Rock  that  followed  them,  that  is,  Christ,  displeased  God, 
became  some  of  them  idolaters,  and  committed  fornication. 
All  these  things  happened  to  them  for  ensamples  or  types, 
and  are  written  for  our  admonition  upon  whom  the  ends 
of  the  world  are  come  (i  Cor.  x.  i-ii).  Jewish  rabbinical 
and  Hellenistic  influences  are  manifest  in  this  interpre- 
tation. In  the  rabbinical  tradition  the  rock  is  represented 
as  having  rolled  through  the  desert  after  the  Israelitish 
host,  and  the  Hellenistic  book,  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon, 
finds  in  the  overshadowing  cloud  the  person  of  the  divine 
Wisdom,  while  Philo  takes  the  rock  for  Wisdom  and  the 
Logos. 

Such  coincidences  are  most  naturally  explained  by  the 
supposition  that  the  education  of  Paul  was  influenced  by 
the  current  ideas  of  the  time,  and  that  he  derived  from  his 
teachers  the  method  of  interpretation  which  they  employed. 
Various  contacts  in  his  writings  with  ideas  and  expressions 
contained  in  the  book  of  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon  already 
mentioned  indicate  that  Hellenistic  ideas  as  well  as  the 
Hellenistic  method  of  interpretation  were  among  the  influ- 
ences that  formed  the  apostle's  thinking.  ''This  book, 
written  by  an  Alexandrian  Jew  in  the  first  century  before 
Christ,  contains  a  polemic  against  heathen  materialism 
and  idolatry  and  an  apology  for  the  Jewish  belief  in  God 
as  the  true  Wisdom  which  secures  the  blessedness  of  man 
in  this  life  and  in  that  which  is  to  come."  The  author 
was  familiar  not  only  with  the  Old  Testament,  but  also 
with  the  philosophy  of  the  Greeks,  of  which  he  makes  use 
in  his  argument,  particularly  of  the  Platonic  doctrine  of 
the  immortality  of  the  soul.  It  is  probable  that  Paul  was 
acquainted  with  this  book,  though  he  so  far  surpasses  its 


14  THE   MAN 

point  of  view  that  its  influence  upon  him  cannot  be  re- 
garded as  of  great  importance.  If  Hellenism  gave  him 
his  ideas  of  the  outward  and  inward  man,  the  "mind" 
(i/oO?),  the  "soul"  ('v/^f%^),  "conscience,"  and  the  "flesh," 
the  use  which  he  makes  of  them  shows  how  far  he 
passed  beyond  his  teachers,  and  how  the  religious  genius 
can  transform  to  divine  ends  materials  which  in  other 
hands  serve  only  trivial  purposes.  The  Book  of  Wisdom 
says  that  the  body  weighs  down  the  soul,  and  oppresses 
the  mind,  and  in  this  fact  the  writer  finds  an  explanation 
of  the  defects  of  the  human  understanding  and  of  spiritual 
incapacity.  But  all  that  he  says  bears  no  comparison  with 
Paul's  arraignment  of  the  flesh  as  the  seat  of  sin  and  his 
graphic  and  powerful  delineation  of  the  fruitless  struggle 
of  the  inward  man  with  the  outward,  of  the  mind  which 
serves  the  law  of  God  with  the  fatal  law  in  the  members 
(Rom.  vii.  15-25).  Paul  was  himself  a  Hellenist,  and 
owed  not  a  little  to  Greece,  but  the  ideas  which  he  re- 
ceived from  his  Hellenistic  teachers  were  subordinated  to 
his  gospel  of  the  cross,  and  came  out  of  his  Christian  con- 
sciousness transformed. 

Whether  the  education  of  the  youthful  Saul  was  com- 
pleted in  the  synagogue  at  Tarsus,  or  in  Jerusalem  "  at 
the  feet  of  Gamaliel,"  as  the  writer  of  Acts  represents,  is 
a  question  which  we  must  leave  without  discussion.*  We 
have  no  declaration  on  the  subject  in  the  letters  of  the 
apostle,  which  also  contain  no  intimation  of  his  presence 
in  Jerusalem  at  the  time  of  the  trial  and  crucifixion  of 
Jesus. t     His  own  assertion  that  he  was  a  Pharisee  of  the 

*  Acts  xxii.  3.  The  speeches  ascribed  to  Paul  in  Acts  must  in  the  nature 
of  the  case  be  regarded  as  composed  by  the  writer  of  that  book. 

t  The  fact  that  Paul  gives  no  intimation  in  his  Epistles  of  a  knowledge  of 
the  preaching  of  the  Baptist  and  of  a  personal  acquaintance  with  Jesus  does 
not  indeed  exclude  his  prior  residence  for  a  few  years  in  Jerusalem,    The  know- 


FORMATIVE   INFLUENCES  1 5 

strictest  sort  is  borne  out  by  his  teachings  and  his  atti- 
tude in  general  toward  the  questions  with  which  the  Jew- 
ish teachers  were  occupied.  Although  the  doctrine  of  the 
resurrection  of  the  dead  underwent  important  modifica- 
tions at  his  hands,  and  was  stripped  of  its  materialistic 
features,  its  source  is  evident.  His  gospel  of  the  cross  is 
Christian  rather  than  Jewish ;  but  only  a  man  imbued  with 
the  Jewish  doctrine  of  satisfaction,  of  atonement  for  sin, 
could  have  conceived  it.  His  doctrine  of  righteousness 
had  its  roots  in  Judaism,  but  it  was  a  bold  and  radical 
modification  of  all  that  he  had  learned  on  the  subject  from 
his  Jewish  teachers.  His  transformation  of  the  national 
doctrine  of  the  Messiah  furnished  him  with  a  solution  of 
the  problem,  how  the  mass  of  men  in  whom  the  evil 
impulse  predominated  could  attain  the  righteousness 
requisite  for  the  Messianic  kingdom,  which  his  teachers 
were  unable  to  resolve.  To  them  the  Messiah  was  to  be  a 
national  deliverer,  and  they  had  no  idea  of  his  religious 
oflfice  as  an  atonement  for  sin.  Paul  solved  the  problem 
by  the  original  conception  of  the  Messiah  as  the  second 
Adam,  the  representative  of  the  human  race,  in  which 
capacity  his  death  on  the  cross  satisfied  the  demands  of 
the  law  for  all,  and  made  accessible  to  them  a  new 
righteousness    by   faith.      In    this  teaching,  however,    he 

ing  of  Christ  "according  to  the  flesh"  (/caret  crapKo),  to  which  he  confesses  in 
2  Cor.  V.  16,  does  not  imply  a  personal  acquaintance  with  him,  but  rather  denotes 
a  knowledge  of  him  prior  to  his  conversion  the  opposite  of  that  spiritual  appre- 
hension of  his  person  and  mission  which  he  afterwards  entertained.  The 
interpretation  of  the  passage  given  by  Jowett  {The  Epistles  of  St.  Paul  to  the 
Thessalonians,  Galatians,  and  Romujis,  Vol.  I.,  pp.  8  ff.)  to  the  effect  that  the 
knowledge  "  according  to  the  flesh  "  was  "  in  a  more  Jewish  and  less  Christian 
manner,"  that  it  was  subsequent  to  the  conversion,  and  that  the  apostle  later 
attained  a  more  spiritual  point  of  view,  is  not  supported  in  the  Epistles.  The 
fact  that  the  profounder  apprehension  of  Christ  does  not  appear  in  i  Thessa- 
lonians is  explained  by  the  point  of  view  of  that  letter  and  the  matters  with 
which  he  had  to  deal  in  writing  it. 


I 6  THE   MAN 

held  fast  to  the  Pharisaic  doctrines,  that  there  is  no  for- 
giveness of  sin  without  a  satisfaction  which  accords  to  the 
law  its  indefeasible  rights,  that  death  is  the  divinely 
ordained  penalty  for  sin,  and  that  atonement  for  the 
transgressions  of  men  who  have  not  themselves  rendered 
satisfaction  may  be  representatively  made  by  another.  In 
connection  with  his  Messianic  doctrine  the  Pharisaic 
teaching  as  to  the  coming  end  of  the  age,  eschatology,  the 
establishment  of  the  Messiah's  kingdom,  appears  to  have 
made  a  most  indelible  impression  upon  him. 

This  hope  of  his  race  did  not,  however,  escape  the 
transformation  which  the  apostle's  religious  genius  effected 
in  everything  that  it  appropriated.  Yet  in  its  fundamental 
features  it  remained  an  important  factor  in  his  thinking. 
With  eager  and  intense  expectation  he  looked  for  "the 
day  of  the  Lord,"  which  would  "  come  as  a  thief  in  the 
night"  (i  Thess.  v.  2)  to  the  joy  of  the  believers  and  to 
the  "  sudden  destruction  "  of  the  unbelievers,  who  "  say 
peace  and  safety."  His  doctrine  of  salvation  was  con- 
structed with  reference  to  this  impending  consummation, 
and  to  be  ''  saved  "  was  for  him  to  be  received  in  the  king- 
dom which  Christ  would  establish  at  his  coming  (Parousia*). 
His  solicitude  for  his  converts  was  that  they  might  be  "  un- 
blamable in  holiness  before  God  at  the  coming  of  our  Lord 
Jesus  Christ  with  all  his  saints"  (i  Thess.  iii.  13).  The 
Jewish  doctrine  of  the  resurrection  of  the  righteous  at 
the  coming  of  the  Messiah  to  introduce  "  the  age  to  come  " 
he  held  under  the  modifications  that  the  righteous  were  the 
believers  in  Christ,  that  these  would  be  raised  with  spiritual 
bodies,  and  the  living  Christians  would  be  ''changed,"  the 
mortal  putting  on  incorruption.      His  intense  preoccupation 

*  This  word,  which  to  the  primitive  church  denoted  the  expected  presence 
(■n-apova-La)  of  the  absent  Jesus,  is  frequently  employed  in  this  volume  to 
designate  his  second  coming. 


FORMATIVE  INFLUENCES  1 7 

with  this  idea  reacted  upon  his  ethics,  and  affected  his 
views  of  marriage,  of  slavery,  and  of  the  relation  of  the 
citizen  to  the  state.  For  "the  time  is  short,"  he  writes 
to  the  Corinthians,  *'  it  remaineth  that  both  they  that  have 
wives  be  as  though  they  had  none,  and  they  that  weep  as 
though  they  wept  not,  and  they  that  buy  as  though  they 
possessed  not,  and  they  that  use  this  world  as  not  abusing 
it;  for  the  fashion  of  this  world  passeth  away"  (i  Cor. 
vii.  29-31). 

From  his  Pharisaic  teachers  Paul  also  adopted  the  idea 
of  a  supersensible  world  of  spiritual  existences,  good  and 
bad,  whose  interference  in  earthly  matters  affects  the 
course  of  affairs  and  individual  fortunes.  He  formulates 
no  specific  doctrine  of  good  and  evil  spirits,  but  his  inci- 
dental mention  of  them  shows  how  his  beliefs  were  to 
a  degree  determined  by  his  environment.  The  angels, 
principahties,  and  powers  of  Rom.  viii.  38  denote  ranks 
or  hierarchies  of  spiritual  existences  supposed  to  inhabit 
the  upper  regions  of  the  atmosphere.  So  far  as  they 
were  conceived  as  evil,  their  chief  was  designated  "the 
prince  of  the  power  of  the  air,  the  spirit  that  now  worketh 
in  the  children  of  disobedience  "  (Eph.  ii.  2).  Accord- 
ingly, the  wrestling  of  the  Christians  was  not  against  fiesh 
and  blood,  but  against  principalities,  powers,  the  rulers  of 
the  darkness  of  the  world,  spiritual  wickedness  in  the  high 
(heavenly,  upper-air)  places  (Eph.  vi.  12).  In  like  man- 
ner, "the  rulers  of  this  world  "  (age)  are  conceived  as  inter- 
fering in  human  affairs  and  being  instrumental  in  putting 
Christ  to  death  (i  Cor.  ii.  8).  Angels  are  conceived  as 
looking  down  upon  the  apostles,  who  become  to  them  a 
"  spectacle  "  (i  Cor.  iv.  9).  In  his  hymn  to  love  the  apostle 
says  that  though  he  "  speak  with  the  tongues  of  angels, 
and  have  not  love,  he  is  become  as  sounding  brass  and  a 
tinkling  cymbal  (i  Cor.  xiii.  i),  and  in  Gal.  I.  8,  that  if  he  or 
c 


I 8  THE  MAN 

an  angel  from  heaven  preach  any  other  doctrine  than  his 
gospel  of  the  cross,  let  him  be  accursed.  The  Galatians 
are  commended  in  that  despite  their  temptation  in  the  flesh 
they  received  him  as  an  angel  of  God  or  as  Christ  Jesus 
(iv.  14).  There  is  nothing  inconsistent  with  his  doctrine  of 
angels  in  the  passage  in  i  Cor.  xi.  10  to  the  effect  that  a 
woman  ought  to  have  her  head  covered  when  she  prayed 
or  prophesied  in  the  worshipping  assemblies,  **  because  of 
the  angels."  It  cannot  be  rejected  on  grounds  of  textual 
criticism,  and  has  been  regarded  by  some  expositors  as  a 
gloss  only  because  it  is  grammatically  inappropriate.  Ac- 
cording to  Gen.  vi.  2  and  its  rabbinic  interpretations,  with 
which  Paul  may  have  been  acquainted,  although  they  were 
not  in  his  time  committed  to  writing,  angels  were  seduced 
by  the  beauty  of  earthly  women,  and  the  passage  in  ques- 
tion was  evidently  written  with  reference  to  this  tradition. 
Chrysostom's  proposed  interpretation  retains  the  angel- 
ology,  but  gives  the  passage  a  more  agreeable  aspect : 
**  Because  good  angels  present  at  Christian  worship  rejoice 
to  see  all  things  done  decently  and  in  order."  But  this 
does  not  explain  why  it  should  be  regarded  as  decent  and 
orderly  for  women  to  be  veiled. 

Paul  has  little  to  say  of  demons,  but  that  he  shared  the 
current  view  of  his  Jewish  environment  with  regard  to 
them  is  evident  from  his  directions  to  the  Corinthians 
respecting  their  eating  of  the  flesh  offered  to  idols  in  the 
gentile  sacrifices.  He  declares  that  ''  the  things  which  the 
gentiles  sacrifice  they  sacrifice  to  devils  [demons]  and  not 
to  God ;  and  I  would  not  that  ye  should  have  fellowship 
with  devils  "  (i  Cor.  x.  20).  Though  **  there  be  gods  many 
and  lords  many"  (i  Cor.  viii.  5),  the  idols  are  not  any- 
thing; but  behind  them  lies  the  realm  of  evil  spirits,  who 
make  use  of  the  idolatrous  worship  for  their  unholy  pur- 
poses.    The  evil  spirit  by  preeminence,  the  great  adver- 


FORMATIVE  INFLUENCES  IQ 

sary,  who  is  called  '' diabolus  "  and  **the  evil  one,"  in  Eph. 
iv.  21  ;  vi.  II,  i6,  Paul  designates  *' the  god  of  this  world," 
who  has  blinded  the  minds  of  his  Jewish  opponents 
(2  Cor.  iv.  4).  In  his  indignation  at  the  fornication  among 
the  Corinthians  he  declares  himself  determined  to  deliver 
the  guilty  man  to  Satan  "for  the  destruction  of  his  flesh  " 
—  an  expression  in  which  is  doubtless  implied  a  miracu- 
lous punishment,  a  long  and  painful  affliction  of  the  flesh, 
through  which  the  offender  had  sinned,  until  it  should  be 
destroyed,  in  order  that  his  ''  spirit  might  be  saved  in  the 
day  of  the  Lord,"  the  Parousia  (i  Cor.  v.  5).  Since  this  pun- 
ishment was  to  be  inflicted  by  Satan,  he  must  have  been 
conceived  as  subject  to  the  control  of  a  higher  power,  so  as 
to  be  constrained  to  serve  the  purpose  of  the  salvation  of  a 
sinner,  just  as  in  the  book  of  Job  the  adversary  is  sent  by 
Yahweh  under  orders  which  he  is  not  to  exceed.  Accord- 
ingly, when  Paul  says  that  there  "  was  given  "  to  him  *'  a 
thorn  in  the  flesh,  the  messenger  of  Satan  to  buffet "  him, 
he  doubtless  conceived  the  affliction  as  of  divine  appoint- 
ment and  as  effected  by  Satan,  as  whose  messenger  or 
"angel"  the  disease  was  regarded.  Or  he  may  have 
thought  that  Christ  dealt  with  him  through  the  adversary, 
since  he  says  he  besought  him  thrice  that  it  might  depart 
from  him  (2  Cor.  xii.  7  f.). 

That  Paul's  education  in  the  Jewish  schools  included 
instruction  in  the  Hagadah  or  the  rabbinical  traditional 
lore  has  already  been  made  apparent.  He  was  at  home 
in  this  "  maze  of  flowery  walks  "  as  well  as  in  the  Script- 
ures themselves,  and  it  is  especially  noteworthy  that, 
with  all  his  reverence  for  the  Old  Testament  as  the  word 
of  the  Spirit,  he  quotes  from  the  Hagadah  as  if  it  were 
equally  valid  with  the  latter,  just  as  ideas  of  the  Wisdom 
of  Solomon  flow  readily  from  his  pen.  All  the  literature 
with  which  he  was  acquainted  was  good  for  him,  if  it  only 


20  THE  MAN 

served  to  support  his  argument.  The  declaration  that 
**  Satan  is  transformed  into  an  angel  of  light"  (2  Cor.  xi. 
14)  was  doubtless  derived  from  the  tradition  that  an  angel 
of  Satan  disguised  wrestled  with  Jacob.  The  persecution 
of  Isaac  by  Ishmael  (Gal.  iv.  29)  is  unknown  to  the  Old 
Testament,  but  is  recorded  in  the  book  of  Jubilees,  where 
is  also  found  the  tradition  that  Abraham  before  his  call 
was  an  uncircumcised  idolater,  and  that  he  received  the 
promise  that  he  should  be  ''the  heir  of  the  world  "  (Rom. 
iv.  10,  13),  all  of  which  is  foreign  to  the  Old  Testament 
record.  The  current  Jewish  idea  of  orders  of  heavens 
is  adopted  in  2  Cor.  xii.  2,  4,  as  if  there  were  actually  such 
a  succession  of  abodes  of  the  blessed  (cf.  Rev.  ii.  7). 
Further  illustrations  are  not  needed  to  show  to  how  great 
an  extent  the  Hagadah  constituted  the  background  of  the 
apostle's  thought,  and  to  serve  as  a  commentary  on  his  own 
declaration  that  he  had  profited  in  the  Jews'  religion  above 
many  of  his  equals  in  his  own  nation,  being  more  exceed- 
ingly zealous  of  the  traditions  of  his  fathers  (Gal.  i.  14). 

These  considerations  show,  what  indeed  is  a  priori 
manifest  without  them,  that  Paul,  like  every  other  man, 
could  not  escape  from  his  environment,  or  resist  its  influ- 
ence upon  his  thought,  and  that  he  was  a  son  of  his  race 
and  age  intellectually  as  well  as  by  physical  descent  a 
Hebrew.  Only  by  a  miracle  could  he  have  been  other- 
wise developed.  The  treasure  of  his  apostleship  was,  as 
he  himself  says,  in  an  ''  earthen  vessel,"  and  in  the 
troubled  earthly  atmosphere  he  saw  "  through  a  glass 
darkly."  A  knowledge  of  these  limitations  is  necessary 
as  a  guide  to  the  interpretation  of  his  thought  and  as  a 
check  upon  the  too  prevalent  error  of  regarding  him  as  a 
divine  oracle  where  he  is  only  speaking  the  language  of 
his  time.  With  the  choice  before  him  between  expound- 
ing the  Pauline  Epistles  in  accordance  with  these  facts  or 


FORMATIVE   INFLUENCES  21 

of  resorting  to  exegetical  artifices,  violence  to  the  rules  of 
grammatical  and  historical  interpretation,  and  even  to  the 
apostle's  own  allegorical  method,  the  conscientious  exegete 
cannot  hesitate  as  to  which  course  he  ought  to  pursue. 
The  apostle  is  fairly  treated,  and  his  greatness  made  ap- 
parent, not  by  the  attempt  to  show  that  he  did  not  act 
like  a  man,  and  think  like  a  Pharisee,  and  interpret  the 
Bible  like  a  rabbi  or  an  Alexandrian  Jew,  and  put  the  Haga- 
dah  and  the  current  literature  under  contribution  like  his 
contemporaries ;  but  much  rather  by  such  a  sympathetic 
interpretation  of  his  thought  along  with  an  acknowledg- 
ment of  his  limitations  as  will  make  it  manifest  that  in  the 
penetration  of  his  spiritual  insight,  in  the  flight  of  his 
religious  genius,  in  his  original  comprehension  of  the  gos- 
pel, in  lofty  courage  and  heroic  sacrifice,  in  devotion  to 
his  Master,  and  in  love  for  mankind,  he  rose  above  the 
pettiness  and  formalism  and  legal  bondage  of  his  race, 
above  Pharisaism,  the  Hagadah,  and  Alexandrian  specula- 
tion, and  became  by  the  strength  and  soundness  of  his 
intellectual  and  moral  character  one  of  the  great  religious 
forces  of  the  world. 


CHAPTER   II 

PERSONAL  TRAITS 

THE  materials  for  forming  an  idea  of  the  personality 
of  Paul  are  extremely  meagre,  and  we  are  obliged  to 
put  up  with  intimations  scattered  through  his  writings  and 
with  traditions  not  altogether  trustworthy  in  the  attempt 
to  construct  a  picture  of  the  man  as  he  lived  and  worked. 
In  the  Acts  of  Paul  and  Thecla  written  in  the  third  cen- 
tury, he  is  represented  as  "  short,  bald,  bow-legged,  with 
meeting  eyebrows,  hooked  nose,  full  of  grace."  John  of 
Antioch,  writing  in  the  sixth  century,  has  preserved  the 
tradition  that  he  "  was  in  person,  round-shouldered,  with  a 
sprinkling  of  gray  on  his  head  and  beard,  with  an  aquiline 
nose,  grayish  eyes,  meeting  eyebrows,  with  a  mixture  of 
pale  and  red  in  his  complexion,  and  an  ample  beard. 
With  a  genial  expression  of  countenance,  he  was  sensi- 
ble, earnest,  easily  accessible,  sweet,  and  inspired  with 
the  Holy  Spirit."  The  pseudo-Lucian's  contemptuous 
reference  to  him,  in  the  fourth  century,  is  to  a  similar 
effect,  and  there  are  hints  in  his  writings  which  confirm 
the  general  impression  that  tradition  has  preserved.  In  2 
Cor.  X.  10  ff.  he  quotes  what  his  Jewish  opponents  said  of 
him  to  the  effect  that  "  his  letters  are  weighty  and  power- 
ful, but  his  bodily  presence  is  weak,  and  his  speech  con- 
temptible." We  may  fairly  assume  that  this  was  not  an 
altogether  groundless  statement,  although  it  came  from 
men  who  were  hostile  to  him,  yet  who  could  hardly  so 
speak  of  him  in  one  of  his  churches  without  a  basis  of 
fact.     It  is  accordingly  probable  that  he  was  not  a  man  of 

22 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  23 

imposing  personal  appearance  calculated  to  make  a  pow- 
erful impression  as  an  orator.  The  reference  to  the 
"  earthen  vessel  "  in  which  he  bore  the  treasure  of  his 
gospel  may  have  sprung  from  a  sense  of  the  frailty  of 
his  ''  outward  man  "  which  he  speaks  of  as  perishing  day 
by  day  (2  Cor.  iv.  7,  16). 

The  tradition  preserved  in  the  Acts  that  in  Lystra  the 
people  took  Barnabas  for  Jupiter  and  Paul  for  Hermes  of 
inferior  stature  goes  to  confirm  the  inference  that  may 
fairly  be  drawn  from  his  own  reference  to  his  weak  per- 
sonal presence  (Acts  xiv.  12).  To  the  Corinthians  he 
writes :  "  I  was  with  you  in  weakness  and  in  fear  and 
much  trembling,"  and  to  the  Galatians :  "  Ye  know  that 
through  [on  account  of]  infirmity  of  the  flesh  I  preached 
the  gospel  to  you  at  the  first"  (i  Cor.  ii.  3  ;  Gal.  iv.  13). 
He  who  always  "  bore  about  in  his  body  the  dying  of  the 
Lord  Jesus "  writes  to  the  Corinthians :  "  For  we  who 
are  in  this  tabernacle  do  groan,  being  burdened,  not  that 
we  would  be  unclothed,  but  clothed  upon,  that  mortality 
might  be  swallowed  up  of  life"  (2  Cor.  iv.  10,  v.  4).  This 
must  at  least  be  regarded  as  the  expression  of  a  man  who 
had  had  a  sad  experience  of  the  burden  of  a  troubled 
physical  existence,  if  it  was  not  written  with  an  immediate 
reference  to  bodily  ills.  When  we  think  of  his  long  and 
wearisome  journeys  and  the  hard  labour  with  his  hands  for 
his  own  support,  we  may  well  wonder  that  no  more  com- 
plaints flowed  from  his  pen.  When  he  "  might  have  been 
burdensome,"  he  says  to  the  Thessalonians :  **  For  ye 
remember,  brethren,  our  labour  and  travail ;  for  labouring 
night  and  day  because  we  would  not  be  chargeable  unto 
any  of  you,  we  preached  unto  you  the  gospel  of  God " 
(i  Thess.  ii.  9).  He  gloried  in  this  renunciation,  and 
would  rather  die  than  that  any  man  should  make  his 
glorying  void,  willing  to  suffer  all  things   lest  he  should 


24  THE   MAN 

hinder  the  gospel  of  Christ  (i  Cor.  ix.  12,  15).  To  the  Co- 
rinthians he  writes :  "  Behold  the  third  time  I  am  ready  to 
come  to  you,  and  I  will  not  be  burdensome  to  you  ;  .  .  . 
and  I  will  very  gladly  spend  and  be  spent  for  you, 
though  the  more  abundantly  I  love  you,  the  less  I  be 
loved  "  (2  Cor.  xii.  14). 

In  two  passages  (2  Cor.  xii.  7  and  Gal.  iv.  13,  14)  Paul 
makes  specific  reference  to  an  affliction  in  the  flesh  which 
doubtless  had  important  relations  to  his  inward  experi- 
ences and  to  personal  peculiarities.  In  the  former  pas- 
sages he  calls  it  *'  a  thorn  in  the  flesh,"  given  him  that  he 
may  not  be  too  much  exalted  by  reason  of  the  revelations 
that  he  received.  As  if  he  conceived  a  diabolical  influence 
to  have  been  employed  to  inflict  the  calamity,  he  calls  it 
"a  messenger  of  Satan  to  buffet  him."  His  prayer,  thrice 
offered  to  Christ  that  it  might  depart  from  him,  was 
answered  only  by  the  assurance  that  his  grace  was 
sufficient.  ''Most  gladly,  therefore,"  he  says,  "will  I 
rather  glory  in  my  infirmities,  that  the  power  of  Christ 
may  rest  upon  me."  In  the  second  passage  he  writes: 
"  Ye  know  that  on  account  of  infirmity  of  the  flesh  I 
preached  unto  you  the  first  time,  and  your  temptation  in 
my  flesh  ye  despised  not  nor  rejected  [loathed],  but  re- 
ceived me  as  an  angel  of  God,  as  Christ  Jesus."  These 
are  certainly  extremely  vague  intimations  from  which  to 
derive  a  conclusion  as  to  the  nature  of  the  affliction  in 
question.  That  it  was  some  sort  of  physical  infirmity  is 
now  generally  maintained  in  opposition  to  the  theory  of 
spiritual  attacks  of  Satan,  solicitations  of  unholy  thoughts, 
or  conflicts  with  sensual  impulses.  The  "thorn  in  the 
flesh"  and  the  buffeting  or  smiting  as  with  the  fists  indi- 
cate severe  bodily  suffering,  and  it  appears  from  verse  9 
that  he  could  not  get  rid  of  it  even  by  an  appeal  to  Christ, 
but  was  still  undergoing  the  affliction.     Light  is  thrown 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  2$ 

upon  the  nature  of  the  malady  only  when  it  is  brought 
into  connection  with  the  foregoing  account  of  his  *'  visions 
and  revelations  of  the  Lord  "  (verses  i-6).  Such  a  connec- 
tion is  obvious  from  the  remark  that  the  "  thorn  in  the 
flesh"  was  given  him  lest  he  be  too  much  exalted  on 
account  of  these  visions  and  revelations.  The  natural 
meaning  is,  that  as  a  sequence  of  the  high  nervous  tension 
and  excitement  attendant  upon  the  visions  there  was  a 
physical  suffering  which  he  describes  as  a  buffeting  or 
beating  by  a  demonic  agency. 

The  phenomena  of  epilepsy  which  have  been  gathered 
from  numerous  examples  in  ancient  and  modern  times  fit 
the  case  better  than  any  other  explanation  that  has  been 
proposed.  The  ancient  physicians  are  said  to  report  that 
affections  of  the  eyes  accompany  the  attacks  of  this 
disease  (Gal.  iv.  15),  and  they  prescribed  a  three-days' 
fast  and  a  shearing  of  the  head  (Acts  ix.  9,  xviii.  18).  If 
not  too  frequent,  the  epileptic  attacks  would  not  seriously 
interfere  with  the  prosecution  of  such  a  work  as  Paul's. 
It  appears  from  the  passage  in  Gal.  iv.  13  f.  that  he  was 
detained  in  Galatia  by  an  "infirmity  of  the  flesh,"  and  he 
commends  the  Galatians  because  they  did  not  despise  that 
in  his  flesh  which  was  a  "  temptation "  to  them  ("your 
temptation"  is  the  proper  reading),  a  circumstance  from 
which  the  inference  is  natural  that  the  affliction  was  one 
which,  like  epilepsy,  was  calculated  to  excite  disgust  on 
account  of  the  distressing  phenomena  which  accompany  it.* 

That  Paul  was  not  married  at  the  time  when  he  wrote 
the    first    Epistle    to    the    Corinthians    is   manifest.      The 

*  Reference  has  been  made  in  this  connection  to  Mahomet,  whom  on  the 
occasions  of  his  "  visions  and  revelations  "  an  angel  was  supposed  to  torment, 
so  that  "  he  foamed  at  the  mouth,  and  struck  wildly  about  him,  until  a  fast, 
death-like  sleep  restored  him  "  to  his  normal  condition.  Many  other  similar 
examples  are  adduced  by  Krenkel,  Beitr'dge  zur  Atifhellung  der  Geschichte 
und der  Briefe  des  Paulus,  1890,  pp.  1 17-125. 


26  THE  MAN 

question  addressed  to  this  church  :  "  Have  we  not  power 
[the  right]  to  lead  about  a  sister,  a  wife,  as  well  as  other 
apostles  and  as  the  brethren  of  the  Lord  and  Cephas  ? " 
(ix.  5),  contains  at  least  an  implication  that  he  was  not 
a  married  man.  Decisive  of  the  question,  however,  is 
another  passage  in  the  same  Epistle  (vii.  7),  in  which  he 
expresses  the  wish  that  all  men  were  even  as  himself,  in 
connection  with  remarks  depreciative  of  the  marriage 
relation.  Whether  he  had  formerly  been  married,  and 
was  at  this  time  a  widower,  is  a  question  on  which  inter- 
preters differ.  The  passage  in  the  eighth  verse  of  the 
chapter  in  question  has  accordingly  received  different 
explanations :  "  I  say  therefore  to  the  unmarried  and 
widows  it  is  good  for  them  to  abide  even  as  I."  It  is 
maintained  by  some  expositors  that  the  word  "  unmarried  " 
{a^d^oi^)  here  means  "widowers,"  and  that  Paul  intended 
simply  to  enjoin  upon  them  and  upon  widows  that  they 
should  follow  his  example  as  a  widower  by  not  remarry- 
ing. The  word  itself,  however,  does  not  mean  exclusively 
widowers,  but  all  the  unmarried,  and  no  good  reason  has 
been  assigned  for  giving  it  here  the  limited  signification. 
The  fact  that  the  unmarried  in  general  are  the  subject  of 
consideration  in  the  earlier  verses  does  not  exclude  them 
from  consideration  in  this  general  declaration.  There  is 
no  ground  for  supposing  that  his  own  widowerhood  was 
prominent  in  his  thought,  and  that  in  verse  7  he  expresses 
the  wish  that  all  men  were  as  he  was  in  that  respect.  The 
dominant  idea  is  that  the  unmarried  state  is  preferable  for 
all,  and  he  would  have  all  men  remain,  as  he  has  remained, 
unmarried.  The  keynote  of  the  section  is  in  the  first 
verse :  *'It  is  good  for  a  man  not  to  touch  a  woman,"  and 
the  succeeding  verses  cannot  be  properly  interpreted  with- 
out reference  to  this. 

Luther's  opinion  that  the  directions  to  married  people 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  2/ 

contained  in  verses  3-5  indicate  the  apostle's  experience 
in  the  marriage  relation  is  not  well  taken,  although  Dr. 
Farrar  thinks  it  shows  ''a  deep  and  fine  insight."  They 
are  simply  such  rules  as  a  man  might  lay  down  who 
regarded  marriage  as  permissible  only  in  order  that 
"fornication"  might  be  prevented  (verse  2),  and  who 
would  have  that  relation  when  entered  upon  furnish  no 
occasion  for  temptation  to  unlawful  sexual  intercourse 
(verse  5).  To  draw,  as  Hausrath  does,  from  such  expres- 
sions as,  "We  were  gentle  among  you  even  as  a  nurse 
cherisheth  her  children"  (i  Thess.  ii.  7);  "My  little 
children,  of  whom  I  travail  in  birth  again  until  Christ  be 
formed  in  you "  (Gal.  iv.  19);  and  "Sudden  destruction 
shall  come  upon  them,  as  travail  upon  a  woman  with 
child"  (i  Thess.  v.  3);  the  conclusion  that  they  show 
"  so  deep  a  feeling  for  family  life  and  such  rich  experience 
in  it "  as  to  strengthen  the  supposition  that  he  had  been 
married,  only  betrays  the  weakness  of  a  position  which 
requires  such  support.  It  is  questionable,  too,  whether 
the  same  scholar's  remark  is  confirmed  by  the  experience 
of  conspicuously  successful  unmarried  men,  that  "  only  in 
a  man  of  experience  [in  which  marriage  is  implied]  are  all 
ages  and  sexes  accustomed  to  have  the  confidence  which 
greeted  the  apostle  everywhere  in  his  churches."  On  the 
whole,  the  presumption  is  against  the  supposition  that  a 
man  was  ever  married  who  held  the  views  of  the  relation 
of  husband  and  wife  which  Paul  expresses  in  i  Cor.  vii. 
I  and  9.  Rather  the  implication  is  that  he  wished  to  have 
it  understood  that  he  possessed  the  "gift"  of  continence, 
(verse  7),  and  meant  to  assign  this  according  to  verses  2 
and  9  as  a  reason  for  his  celibacy.  One  who  believed, 
as  he  did,  that  a  father  who  does  not  allow  his  virgin 
daughter  to  marry  "does  better"  than  the  one  who  gives 
her  in  marriage,  could  hardly  with  a  good  conscience  have 
taken  a  maiden  as  his  wife. 


28  THE  MAN 

The  apostle's  confession  of  his  ante-Christian  relation  to 
the  religion  in  which  he  was  reared,  to  the  effect  that  he 
was,  above  his  equals  in  his  own  nation,  ''  exceedingly 
zealous  of  the  traditions  of  his  fathers"  (Gal.  i.  14),  dis- 
closes an  interesting  aspect  of  his  personality.  His  nature 
was  of  that  eager,  tempestuous  sort  in  which  intensity  of 
conviction  and  resoluteness  of  purpose  are  leading  charac- 
teristics. He  could  do  nothing  by  halves.  His  aim,  once 
clearly  set  before  him,  became  the  dominant  power  of  his 
life,  and  pushed  him  to  its  realisation  without  fear  of  con- 
sequences and  without  self-regard.  As  a  Jew,  he  believed 
that  the  Christian  sect  was  an  enemy  of  his  religion,  an 
offence  to  God,  and  a  menace  to  the  institutions  of  his 
race,  and  he  threw  himself  into  the  cause  of  an  un- 
sparing extermination  of  them.  On  the  other  hand, 
''when  it  pleased  God  ...  to  reveal  his  Son  in  me," 
he  writes,  ''immediately  I  conferred  not  with  flesh  and 
blood,  neither  went  I  up  to  Jerusalem  to  them  who  were 
apostles  before  me."  This  consciousness  that  he  had  a 
revelation,  a  divine  commission,  induced  "immediately" 
a  resolution  to  act  independently  of  all  human  counsel, 
and  to  preach  his  own  gospel  in  his  own  way, —  a  resolu- 
tion to  which  he  adhered  with  all  the  intensity  and  energy 
of  his  determined  nature  throughout  his  life.  Opposition, 
persecution,  the  attempt  to  alienate  the  confidence  of  his 
churches,  could  not  turn  him  from  his  great  purpose  to 
preach  the  gospel  to  the  gentiles,  or  shake  his  conviction 
that  without  submission  to  Jewish  rites,  those  of  them 
who  believed  in  Christ  were  entitled  to  an  equal  rank  with 
Jews  in  the  coming  kingdom. 

Such  a  man  could  take  the  uncircumcised  Titus  with 
him  into  the  stronghold  of  the  circumcision,  and  at 
Antioch  could  withstand  Peter  to  the  face,  and  charge 
him  with  dissembling  (Gal.  ii.  3,  11,  13).     The  quality  of 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  29 

the  zealot  which  he  manifested  as  a  Jew  remained,  trans- 
figured by  Christian  love,  his  prominent  characteristic  as 
a  missionary  of  the  new  religion,  so  that  ''more"  than  his 
judaising  opponents  he  was  '*a  minister  of  Christ"  —  *'in 
labours  more  abundant,  in  stripes  above  measure,  in  prisons 
more  frequent,  in  deaths  oft."  He  was  undaunted  by 
long  and  laborious  journeys  through  wild  and  perilous 
regions.  He  was  not  turned  aside  from  the  pursuit  of  his 
great  mission  by  the  ''  forty  stripes  save  one  "  five  times 
inflicted  by  the  Jews;  by  being  "thrice  beaten  with  rods," 
*'once  stoned,"  ''thrice  shipwrecked";  by  "a  night  and 
a  day  upon  the  deep  "  ;  by  perils  of  waters,  of  robbers, 
from  his  own  countrymen,  from  the  heathen,  in  the  city, 
in  the  wilderness,  among  false  brethren ;  "  in  weariness 
and  painfulness,  in  watchings  often,  in  hunger  and  thirst, 
in  fastings  often,  in  cold  and  nakedness."  Rather,  he 
exclaims,  "  I  take  pleasure  in  infirmities,  in  reproaches,  in 
necessities,  in  persecution,  in  distresses  for  Christ's  sake ; 
for  when  I  am  weak,  then  I  am  strong"  (2  Cor.  xi.  24-27, 
xii.  10).  Besides  all  this,  with  unbending  resolution  he 
carried  out  his  purpose  of  self-support,  "  working  day  and 
night." 

The  zealot  Saul,  who  was  a  vehement  persecutor  of 
the  Christians,  naturally  became  the  zealot  Paul  in  his 
advocacy  and  defence  of  his  peculiar  interpretation  of 
Christianity.  His  Christian  experience  did  not  radically 
change  his  nature.  If  he  was  indefatigable,  self-sacrificing, 
and  fearless  in  the  prosecution  of  his  mission  to  the 
gentiles,  he  was  impatient  of  the  opposition  which  those 
who  did  not  share  his  apprehension  of  the  gospel  felt 
called  upon  to  put  in  his  way.  There  was  a  vein  of  intol- 
erance in  his  nature  which  rendered  him  severe  and 
unsparing  in  his  judgment  of  those  who  represented  a 
point  of  view  opposed  to  his.     He  could  not  put  up  with 


30''  THE  MAN 

a  course  of  conduct  which  he  regarded  as  trimming.  But 
whether  Peter's  change  of  attitude  at  Antioch  under  the 
influence  of  the  emissaries  from  James,  with  whose  point  of 
view  he  probably  sympathised,  deserved  so  hard  a  name 
as  "  dissembling,"  may  be  questioned.  One  cannot  but 
think  that  Peter  and  his  associates  must  have  looked  upon 
the  charge  as  not  a  little  harsh  and  savouring  of  assump- 
tion from  a  man  who  in  support  of  his  authority  could 
only  appeal  to  "revelations"  which  he  claimed  to  have 
had,  that  the  original  apostles  of  Jesus  did  not  "  walk 
uprightly  according  to  the  truth  of  the  gospel,"  because 
they  did  not  believe  with  him  that  uncircumcised  gentiles 
were  entitled  to  equal  privileges  with  Jewish  Christians  in 
the  kingdom  of  Christ,  and  that  a  man  is  justified  by  faith 
and  not  by  the  works  of  the  law,  in  opposition  to  all  that 
they  had  learned  from  Moses  and  the  prophets  (Gal.  ii.  1 1- 
17).  It  does  not  concern  us  here  which  of  the  two  views 
was  right,  and  which  was  destined  to  prevail  in  accord- 
ance with  the  tendency  of  human  thought.  There  was 
right  on  both  sides.  The  gentile  mission  prevailed,  and 
became  one  of  the  great  forces  in  human  history;  but 
justification  by  faith,  as  Paul  apprehended  it,  has  not 
enjoyed  such  a  fortune,  and  is  a  doctrine  of  doubtful 
ethical  worth. 

We  are  concerned  only  to  point  out  that  Paul's  charges 
and  his  withstanding  to  the  face  indicate  a  trait  of  his 
personality  that  did  not  render  him  a  calm  and  unpas- 
sionate  judge  of  the  attitude  and  the  grounds  of  his 
opponents.  In  the  same  Epistle  (i.  7  f.)  he  charges  the 
judaising  Christians  with  an  intention  to  **  pervert  the 
gospel  of  Christ,"  and  calls  down  a  curse  on  any  one  who 
preaches  a  gospel  different  from  that  which  he  had 
preached  to  the  Galatians,  and  to  make  the  anathema 
doubly   strong  he  repeats  it.     In   the   excess   of   his   irri- 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  3 1 

tability  and  the  intensity  of  his  indignation  against  the 
men  who  sought  to  impose  "another  gospel"  upon  the 
Galatians,  he  expresses  with  terrible  irony  the  wish  that 
these  advocates  of  Jewish  rites  might  intensify  and  make 
more  thorough  their  own  circumcision  (Gal.  v.  12)!*  In 
2  Cor.  ii.  14-17  the  apostle  characterises  his  opponents 
as  ''those  that  perish"  in  contrast  with  "those  that  are 
saved,"  thus,  according  to  his  doctrine  of  the  last  things, 
dooming  them  to  the  death  from  which  there  is  no  resur- 
rection. He  then  proceeds  to  charge  them  with  corrupting 
the  word  of  God,  that  is,  making  it  a  source  of  gain  {Kairr]\- 
€V(jo),  and  in  xi.  13-15  he  arraigns  them  as  "false  apostles, 
deceitful  workers,  transforming  themselves  into  apostles 
of  Christ."  "No  marvel,"  he  goes  on  to  say,  "for 
Satan  himself  is  transformed  into  an  angel  of  light. 
Therefore  it  is  no  great  thing  if  his  ministers  also  be 
transformed  as  the  ministers  of  righteousness,  whose  end 
shall  be  according  to  their  works."  This  is  the  climax  of 
an  odium  theologiciim  which  is  not  softened  by  a  touch  of 
sympathy  or  consideration  for  an  opponent's  point  of  view. 
The  apostle's  relations  to  his  churches  often  placed  him  in 
difficult  and  delicate  situations  which  called  for  great  tact 
and  skill  in  the  management  of  men  and  affairs.  These 
circumstances  bring  into  view  important  traits  of  his  char- 
acter. The  situation  in  the  Galatian  churches  was  espe- 
cially trying.  The  judaising  opponents  had  endeavoured 
to  convince  the  simple-minded  believers  here  that  Paul 
had  misled  them  with  his  gospel  of  the  uncircumcision, 
that  he  was  really  no  apostle  of  Christ,  and  that  in  order 
to  become  real  members  of  the  Christian  fold  and  partici- 
pants in  the  blessedness  of  the  coming  kingdom  they  must 
submit  to  the  Jewish  rites.  The  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
was  intended  to  counteract  this  influence,  and  though  it 

*  o(p€\ov  aTOKb\povTai^  make  themselves  eunuchs. 


32  THE   MAN 

was  evidently  written  in  a  white  heat  of  indignation  and 
under  great  excitement,  it  is  a  masterpiece  of  apologetic- 
polemic  writing  in  its  adaptation  to  the  circumstances. 
Even  in  the  salutation,  in  which  he  invokes  ''grace  and 
peace  from  God  the  Father  and  from  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ "  upon  the  churches,  he  cannot  refrain  from  touch- 
ing upon  the  subject  of  his  apostleship  which  lay  so  near 
his  heart,  and  accordingly  begins  :  '*  Paul,  an  apostle,  (not 
of  men,  neither  by  man,  but  by  Jesus  Christ,  and  God  the 
Father,  who  raised  him  from  the  dead)."  Then  he  throws 
himself  immediately  into  his  theme :  "  I  marvel  that  ye 
are  so  soon  removed  from  him  that  called  you  into  the 
grace  of  Christ  unto  another  gospel,  which  is  not  another," 
that  is,  is  no  real  gospel  at  all,  for,  he  adds,  those  who 
preach  it  ''pervert  the  gospel  of  Christ."  Then  follows 
the  harsh  anathema  already  referred  to. 

Immediately  Paul  proceeds  to  the  defence  of  his  apos- 
tleship, which  was  vital  to  the  discussion,  with  a  rapid 
sketch  of  his  call,  of  the  revelation  of  the  Son  of  God  in 
him,  and  of  his  subsequent  contest  with  and  victory  over 
the  original  apostles  in  Jerusalem.  "I  certify  to  you, 
brethren,"  he  exclaims,  "that  the  gospel  which  was 
preached  of  me  is  not  after  man"  (Gal.  i.  ii).  In  his 
indignation  and  irritability  he  bluiltly  calls  the  Galatians 
"foolish,"  and  repeats  the  epithet-(iii.  i,  3).  He  declares 
that  they  have  been  "bewitched,"  and  as  if  he  knew  by 
report  or  by  his  knowledge  of  the  method  of  his  opponents 
that  they  had  appealed  to  the  promise  to  Abraham,  he 
enters  upon  an  exposition  of  that  matter  from  his  own 
point  of  view  (iii.  16-19,  iv.  22-28).  He  draws  from  the 
armory  of  the  judaisers  the  weapons  with  which  he  over- 
comes them,  and  shows  from  the  Scriptures  themselves 
that  the  promise  to  Abraham  had  no  validity  through  the 
law,  which  brought  only  a  curse,  but  that  its  entire  signifi- 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  33 

cance  rested  upon  the  atonement  of  Christ,  whereby  was 
provided  the  sole  true  righteousness,  that  by  faith  (iii.  13, 
14,  22-26,  V.  5,  6,  18).  But  though  he  could  rebuke  unspar- 
ingly, and  denounce  with  impassioned  zeal,  he  knew  how 
to  mingle  tenderness  for  his  converts  with  reproach  of 
them  and  invective  against  those  who  would  alienate  them 
from  him.  After  charging  them  with  returning  to  "the 
weak  and  beggarly  elements  whereunto  they  desire  again 
to  be  in  bondage,"  after  expressing  the  apprehension  lest 
the  labour  he  had  bestowed  upon  them  had  been  in  vain, 
and  after  the  implication  that  they  regarded  him,  their 
best  friend,  as  an  enemy,  because  he  had  told  them  the 
truth,  he  gives  expression  to  the  love  and  yearning  in  his 
heart  for  his  spiritual  children,  whom  he  had  taught  in  the 
midst  of  suffering  from  the  infirmity  of  his  flesh,  in  the 
pathetic  outcry  :  "  My  little  children,  of  whom  I  travail  in 
birth  again  until  Christ  be  formed  in  you,  I  desire  to  be 
present  with  you  now,  and  to  change  my  voice"  (iv.  9,  11, 
13,  19,  20).  "For,"  he  says,  "I  am  in  doubt  of  you." 
He  is  not  clear  in  his  mind  whether  the  tone  of  severity 
and  reproof  which  he  had  assumed  in  the  Epistle  was  the 
one  best  adapted  to  the  end  he  had  in  view,  and  evidently 
felt  that  if  he  could  see  and  talk  with  them  face  to  face,  he 
could  better  adapt  himself  to  the  emergency.  There  is  a 
note  of  kindliness  and  consideration  in  these  words  which 
reveals  the  gentleness  and  the  greatness  of  his  heart. 

The  situation  in  the  Corinthian  church  prior  to  the  writ- 
ing of  the  two  Epistles  addressed  to  it  was  extremely  com- 
plicated, and  these  letters  may  be  regarded  as  furnishing 
the  best  example  that  the  apostle  has  left  of  his  ability  to 
deal  with  divisions  and  strife  and  to  adjust  delicate  affairs. 
The  believers  here  who  were  mostly  of  the  common  sort  of 
people,  "not  many  wise  men  after  the  flesh,  not  many 
mighty,   not   many   noble"   (i   Cor.   i.   26),   had  evidently 


34  THE   MAN 

become  not  a  little  confused  by  the  gospel  of  Paul  and  by 
other  teachers  who  had  been  among  them,  and  had  divided 
themselves  into  contending  parties.  Paul's  metaphysics 
of  the  flesh  and  the  Spirit  had  shared  the  fortune  which 
often  falls  to  metaphysics  of  not  only  being  misunderstood, 
but  also  perverted  to  an  opposite  intention.  From  their 
reasonings  on  the  relation  of  the  flesh  and  the  Spirit 
opposite  conclusions  had  been  drawn,  some  evidently 
thinking  that  whatever  pertained  to  the  former  was  of 
slight  importance,  and  that  its  lusts  might  be  gratified 
with  impunity,  and  others  that  all  indulgence  of  it  was 
corrupting,  and  that  even  celibacy  was  preferable  to  mar- 
riage. The  question  of  circumcision  appears  also  to  have 
divided  the  church,  and  there  prevailed  conflicting  opin- 
ions on  the  resurrection.  The  ecstatic  phenomena  of 
speaking  with  tongues  had  assumed  undue  proportions,  so 
that  there  was  danger  lest  outsiders  should  think  the  be- 
lievers to  be  "mad."  Excesses  were  rife  in  the  observ- 
ance of  the  Lord's  Supper,  the  believers  were  going  to  law 
with  one  another  before  heathen  magistrates,  and  to  com- 
plete the  confusion  the  women  were  asserting  their  equal- 
ity with  the  men,  and  claiming  the  right  to  speak  in 
prayer  or  prophesying  in  the  religious  assemblies  with 
their  heads  unveiled. 

The  first  Epistle  was  written  with  reference  to  these 
complications,  and  its  various  motifs  are  manifest  on  a  cur- 
sory reading.  With  exhortation,  argument,  and  appeal, 
with  rebuke  and  admonition,  with  a  mingling  of  doctrine 
and  practical  precepts,  with  plea  and  threat,  and  with  love 
and  religious  fervour,  the  apostle  develops  his  skilful  diplo- 
macy. With  not  a  little  acumen  he  rebukes  the  partisans 
who  claimed  to  be  ''of  Paul"  with  the  questions,  "Was 
Paul  crucified  for  you }  or  were  ye  baptized  in  the  name  of 
Paul .?  "     There  could  consistently  be  only  one  party,  and 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  35 

that  "  of  Christ,"  since  he  was  crucified  for  them,  and  in 
his  name  they  were  baptized.  His  condemnation  of  the 
believers  on  account  of  their  ''  envying  and  strife  and  divi- 
sions "  is  not  only  very  severe  from  his  own  doctrinal  point 
of  view  as  to  the  flesh  and  the  Spirit,  but  it  also  involves 
a  renunciation  of  his  great  principle  that  Christian  be- 
lievers were  as  such  in  possession  of  the  Spirit  (Rom.  viii. 
9,  15,  16,  26;  Gal.  iii.  2,  5  ;  i  Cor.  xii.  3).  He  calls  them 
bluntly  "  carnal,"  which  is  as  much  as  to  say  that  they  are 
not  Christians,  but  "fleshly,"  as  they  were  according  to 
iii.  I  when  he  began  his  ministry  among  them.  According 
to  ii.  6  they  did  not  belong  to  the  "perfect "to  whom  he 
could  speak  "wisdom."  Yet  to  these  same  Corinthians  he 
says  that  they  "came  behind  in  no  spiritual  gift,"  and  that 
"the  Spirit  of  God  dwells  in  them"  (i  Cor.  i.  7,  iii.  16, 
vi.  19),  while  in  the  zeal  of  his  condemnation  of  them  for 
going  to  law  with  one  another  before  heathen  magistrates, 
he  charges  them  with  defrauding  their  brethren,  and  asks 
them  if  they  do  not  know  that  "the  unrighteous  shall  not 
inherit  the  kingdom  of  God  "  ( i  Cor.  vi.  8  f .).  The  agreement 
of  this  with  the  doctrine  in  Rom.  viii.  29,  that  the  Chris- 
tians are  "the  called"  according  to  God's  "purpose,"  that 
"  whom  he  foreknew  he  also  predestinated  to  be  con- 
formed to  the  image  of  his  Son,"  and  that  these  he  "jus- 
tified," is  not  apparent.  In  his  zeal  for  the  welfare  of  the 
church  and  his  preoccupation  with  practical  affairs  he  dis- 
regards the  relation  of  his  words  to  his  general  doctrines. 
He  was  too  intense  and  impetuous  to  be  always  consistent. 
There  is  a  bitter  irony  in  the  declaration  (iv.  3),  "  It  is  a 
very  small  thing  that  I  should  be  judged  of  you  or  of  man's 
judgment,"  whether  or  not,  as  Weizsacker  thinks,  it  had 
really  been  planned  in  Corinth  that  the  apostle  should  be 
put  on  trial. 

With  what  cutting  sarcasm  are  the  Corinthians  rebuked 


36  THE  MAN 

for  their  self-sufficiency  and  j^ride,  for  glorying  in  what 
they  had  as  if  it  had  not  been  given  them,  and  for  assum- 
ing to  act  the  part  of  rulers  and  judges !  *'  Now  ye  are 
full,  now  ye  are  rich,  ye  have  reigned  as  kings  without  us ; 
and  I  would  to  God  ye  did  reign,  that  we  also  might  reign 
with  you."  This  irony  is  heightened  by  the  picture  imme- 
diately following,  of  the  humiliation  and  self-denial  of  the 
apostle  himself :  "  For  I  think  that  God  hath  set  forth  us 
the  apostles  last,  as  it  were  appointed  unto  death ;  for  we 
are  made  a  spectacle  unto  the  world  and  to  angels  and  to 
men.  We  are  fools  for  Christ's  sake,  but  ye  are  wise  ;  we 
are  weak,  but  ye  are  strong  ;  ye  are  honourable,  but  we  are 
despised."  Then  the  masterpiece  of  invective  is  com- 
pleted by  a  pathetic  delineation  of  the  hunger  and  thirst 
and  nakedness  and  buffeting  and  homelessness  and  labour 
with  his  own  hands  which  had  been  his  wretched  lot 
(i  Cor.  iv.  7-14).  Immediately,  however,  his  heart  asserts 
itself,  and  as  if  he  repented  of  his  severity  he  says :  "  I 
write  not  these  things  to  shame  you,  but  as  my  beloved 
sons  I  warn  you.  For  though  ye  have  ten  thousand  in- 
structors in  Christ,  yet  have  ye  not  many  fathers ;  for  in 
Christ  Jesus  I  have  begotten  you  in  the  gospel."  Then 
again  the  mood  changes,  and  he  remembers  the  salutary 
uses  of  fear :  *'  Now  some  are  puffed  up,  as  though  I 
would  not  come  to  you.  But  I  will  come  to  you  shortly,  if 
the  Lord  will,  and  will  know,  not  the  speech  of  them  who 
are  puffed  up,  but  the  power.  What  will  ye  }  shall  I 
come  to  you  with  a  rod,  or  in  love  V 

With  reference  to  the  judgment  pronounced  upon  the 
fornicator  or  incestuous  man  (i  Cor.  v.  5),  to  which 
reference  has  been  made  in  the  foregoing  chapter,  one 
cannot  but  admire  the  moral  earnestness  of  the  apostle 
and  his  zeal  for  the  purity  of  the  church,  while  one  is  com- 
pelled to  admit  that  the  proceeding  indicates  the  impetu- 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  37 

osity  of  his  character  and  a  haste  and  passionateness 
which,  as  Riickert  remarks,  can  never  do  any  good.  One 
cannot  but  ask  how  he  could  be  certain  of  the  issue  with 
respect  to  the  ethical  results  of  the  terrible  ordeal  to  which 
he  determined  to  subject  the  man.  Was  it  certain  that 
in  the  power  of  Satan  for  **the  destruction  of  the  flesh" 
the  man's  **  spirit "  would  be  "saved  in  the  day  of  the 
Lord  "  }  Could  he  have  considered  whether  the  satanic 
agency  was  trustworthy  in  the  matter  of  saving  a  soul 
through  a  disciplinary  penalty  }  The  idea  proposed  by 
Heinrici  that  he  had  excommunication  in  mind,  the  cast- 
ing out  of  the  man  into  the  non-Christian  world,  of  which 
Satan  was  the  ruler  according  to  2  Cor.  iv.  4,  and  that 
Satan  by  giving  his  passions  full  sway  would  finally 
destroy  his  flesh,  neither  removes  the  difficulty  involved  in 
the  delivery  of  the  man  to  demonic  powers,  nor  explains 
how  unrestricted  indulgence  of  the  flesh  could  save  his 
spirit.  In  either  case  the  judgment  was  harsh  and  the 
proceeding  hasty,  and  we  may  as  well  frankly  acknowledge 
this  fact,  and  say  with  Schmiedel,  ''  But  an  apostle  also 
remains  after  all  a  man,  and  does  not  sit  in  the  council  of 
God."  With  regard  to  the  contention  that  "all  things  are 
lawful,"  Paul  concedes  it  with  an  important  qualification. 
It  was  probably  urged  by  those  who  favoured  the  eating  of 
things  offered  to  idols,  on  the  ground  that  what  concerned 
the  flesh  was  of  no  importance.  But  while  maintaining 
that  he  cannot  permit  himself  to  be  brought  under  the 
power  of  anything,  he  says  that  all  things  are  not  expedi- 
ent, and  every  one  must  consider  in  his  conduct  the  wel- 
fare of  the  weaker  (i  Cor.  vi.  12,  viii.  9). 

The  principle  of  personal  liberty,  which  the  apostle  ex- 
presses in  the  declaration  that  he  cannot  permit  himself  to 
be  brought  under  the  power  of  anything,  denotes  in  its 
application  by  him  a  prominent  characteristic.     He  would 


38  THE  MAN 

not  have  his  "  liberty  judged  of  another  man's  conscience  " 
(i  Cor.  X.  29).  The  injunction  to  the  Christians,  however, 
not  to  use  their  Hberty  as  an  occasion  to  the  flesh,  indicates 
his  sane  and  sober  view  of  freedom,  and  shows  that  he 
regarded  it  as  the  worst  kind  of  bondage,  if  it  were  not 
subject  to  reason  and  employed  in  subordination  to  right 
ethical  principles.  He  conceived  himself  to  be  a  freeman 
only  in  the  sense  that  he  was  Christ's  freeman.  In  his 
sense  of  independence  we  see  a  natural  characteristic 
which  was  not  only  intensified  by  his  Christian  experience 
of  liberation  from  the  restrictions  of  the  Jewish  law,  but 
also  subdued  and  chastened  by  ''the  love  of  God  shed 
abroad  "  in  his  heart,  and  by  the  sentiment  of  brotherhood 
and  self-sacrifice,  which  could  not  but  prevail  in  him  as 
one  having  his  life  ''  in  Christ."  Accordingly,  though 
"free  from  all  men,"  he  made  himself  "the  servant  of  all," 
that  he  "  might  gain  the  more,"  becoming  to  the  Jews  as 
a  Jew,  to  them  that  were  without  law  as  without  law,  to 
the  weak  as  weak,  and  all  things  to  all  men ;  that  he 
"  might  by  all  means  save  some"  (i  Cor.  ix.  19-22).  The 
qualification  which  he  inserts  in  connection  with  the  dec- 
laration that  he  was  "  without  law,"  "  under  the  law  to 
Christ"  (eWo/Lto?  xP^^'^v\  i^  significant  of  the  salutary  sub- 
ordination of  his  liberty  and  of  his  sense  that  in  being 
free  in  Christ  he  was  dependent  upon  him,  and  recognised 
in  his  indwelling  presence  the  source  of  his  ability  to 
serve  and  save.  How  his  independence  asserted  itself 
without  any  mitigation  we  have  already  seen  in  his  dealing 
with  those  who  opposed  his  mission  and  "perverted"  the 
gospel  among  his  churches.  His  attitude  toward  the 
original  apostles  in  Jerusalem  was  similar  to  that  which  he 
assumed  toward  the  "false  brethren"  who  "came  in 
privily  to  spy  out  our  liberty  which  we  have  in  Christ 
Jesus,  that  they  might  bring  us  into  bondage  "  (Gal.  ii.  4). 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  39 

He  speaks  of  them  with  an  undisguised  consciousness  of 
his  own  equality  with,  if  not  of  superiority  to,  them.  He 
asserts  the  right  as  an  apostle  to  claim  as  they  did  the 
hospitality  of  the  churches  for  a  wife,  were  he  so  disposed 
(i  Cor.  ix.  5).*  These  men  who  "seemed  to  be  some- 
what," ''added  nothing"  to  him.  He  recognised  in  them 
no  authority  to  control  his  conscience.  Men,  whatever 
their  standing  and  antecedents,  were  nothing  to  him, 
where  a  principle  was  involved.  "  God  accepteth  no  man's 
person."  ''Not  for  an  hour"  did  he  "give  place  to  them 
by  subjection"  (Gal.  ii.  5,  6).  "In  nothing"  did  he  think 
himself  "a  whit  behind  the  very  chiefest  apostles."  Yet 
his  freedom  and  independence  were  not  asserted  without 
a  consciousness  that  they  rested  upon  a  valid  basis.  He 
believed  that  he  was  illuminated,  that  he  possessed  "  the 
Spirit,"  and  that  as  the  subject  of  a  divine  revelation  he 
had  a  "  knowledge  "  of  the  truth  with  respect  to  Chris- 
tianity, which  rendered  it  unnecessary  to  inquire  of  any 
one,  to  "  seek  counsel  of  flesh  and  blood,"  and  in  virtue  of 
which  the  sacrifice  of  his  liberty  would  be  treason  to 
Christ  who  had  illuminated  him.  Accordingly,  he  says  in 
a  tone  which  borders  on  boasting,  when  he  for  the  second 
time    makes    the    declaration    of    his    equality   with    "the 

*  A  "  wife,"  and  not  a  "  sister,"  who  may  be  assumed  to  have  travelled 
with  him  in  a  relation  of  reciprocal  "  Platonic  affection,"  according  to  the 
apocryphal  story  of  The  Acts  of  Paul  and  Thecla.  The  apostle  does  not  say, 
a  sister  or  a  wife,  but  "  a  sister,  a  wife."  Mr.  S.  Baring-Gould  {A  Study  of 
St.  Paid,  1897)  thus  wonderfully  "paraphrases"  the  passage,  I  Cor.  ix.  5: 
"There  is  a  difference  between  a  wife  and  a  female  companion.  It  is  much 
better  to  be  attended  by  the  latter  and  to  live  in  Platonic  affection,  because 
then  the  time  of  the  woman  is  not  taken  up  with  domestic  affairs.  But  if  one 
so  living  finds  that  his  affection  is  ripening  into  love,  by  all  means  let  him 
marry  her.  There  is  no  harm  in  so  doing.  Yet  the  former  is  in  my  opinion 
under  present  circumstances  most  to  be  recommended  "  !  Of  the  method  of 
interpretation  which  reads  into  a  passage  ideas  totally  foreign  to  the  thought 
of  the  writer,  this  is  a  most  astounding  example. 


40 


THE  MAN 


chiefest  of  the  apostles  "  :    "  Though  I  be  rude  in  speech, 
yet  not  in  knowledge  "  (2  Cor.  xi.  6). 

In  his  treatment  of  the  question  of  marriage  and  the 
sexual  relation,  about  which  the  Corinthian  church  had 
written  the  apostle,  there  is  a  manifest  limitation  of  the 
point  of  view  that  is  characteristic  of  him  in  the  discussion 
of  other  matters.  The  whole  matter  is  discussed  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  illicit  relations  of  the  sexes.  If  this 
limitation  was  contained  in  the  questions  proposed  to  him, 
as  may  have  been  the  case,  this  circumstance  furnishes 
only  a  partial  palliation  of  the  defect.  The  general  propo- 
sitions are  that  it  is  good  for  a  man  to  have  no  sexual 
relations  with  a  woman;  that  if  one  have  not  the  "gift" 
of  continence,  one  may  marry  rather  than  permit  oneself 
indulgence  in  illicit  relations ;  that  his  own  wish  is  that  all 
men  remain  unmarried  as  he  has  remained;  and  that  the 
father  who  does  not  give  his  daughter  in  marriage  does 
better  than  the  one  who  allows  her  to  marry  (i  Cor.  vii. 
i>  2,  7,  9,  37,  38).  Nothing  is  said  of  the  sanctity  of  the 
marriage  relation,  of  the  purifying  influence  ot  the  chaste 
affection  of  husband  and  wife,  of  the  blessedness  of  pa- 
ternity, and  of  the  inestimable  uses  of  the  home  as  a 
moral  and  social  power.  We  cannot  be  limited  in  our 
judgment  of  a  man  by  what  he  says  on  a  given  subject. 
We  must  also  take  into  account  what  he  does  not  say. 
The  reason  why  Paul  did  not  say  more  is  evident.  He 
wrote  for  the  day  and  the  hour.  He  wrote  with  reference 
to  having  his  believers  "unblamable  in  the  day  of  the 
Lord."  He  saw  everything  in  the  blinding  light  of  the 
approaching  "  glory "  of  the  great  day  of  the  Parousia. 
Hence  he  gave  no  thought  to  the  foundations  of  a  perma- 
nent social  order  upon  the  earth.  Another  limitation 
appears  in  his  treatment  of  divorce.  The  question  is  not 
considered  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  social  order,  but 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  4 1 

from  that  of  belief  and  unbelief.  He  sets  out  with  "the 
word  of  the  Lord  "  (Christ)  to  the  effect  that  divorce  is 
absolutely  unpermissible.  Then  he  proceeds  to  say  on  his 
own  authority  that  in  case  one  of  the  parties  to  a  mar- 
riage-contract is  an  unbeliever,  the  continuance  of  the 
relation  may  depend  upon  this  one's  choice,  if  she  or  he 
"be  pleased  to  dwell  with"  him  or  her  (i  Cor.  vii.  12,  13), 
as  if  he  thought  "the  word  of  the  Lord"  had  no  applica- 
tion to  an  "unbelieving"  husband  or  wife.  Upon  the 
apparently  unquestionable  proposition  that  the  children  of 
these  mixed  marriages  are  "  holy  "  he  founds  the  doctrine 
that  "the  unbelieving  husband  is  sanctified  by  the  [be- 
lieving] wife,  and  the  unbelieving  wife  by  the  [believing] 
husband." 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  the  question  is  here  treated,  as  is 
often  Paul's  manner,  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  principle 
which  he  regarded  as  once  for  all  settled.  The  "  holi- 
ness "  of  the  children  of  mixed  marriages  is  assumed,  and 
thence  is  drawn  the  conclusion  that  both  parents  must  be 
"sanctified,"  since  if  they  were  "carnal,"  that  is,  did  not 
possess  the  Spirit,  the  taint  of  the  flesh  must  descend  to 
their  offspring.  Yet  it  appears  from  the  questions  in 
verse  16  :  "  What  knowest  thou,  O  wife,  whether  thou  shalt 
save  thy  husband }  or  how  knowest  thou,  O  man,  whether 
thou  shalt  save  thy  wife } "  that  this  reciprocal  sanctifi- 
cation  was  not  conceived  as  securing  the  salvation  of  the 
person  so  sanctified.  It  had  no  further  consequences  than 
to  make  the  children  "  holy."  The  question  of  slavery  is 
in  like  manner  disposed  of  under  a  general  principle,  that 
of  liberty  in  Christ.  The  believing  slave  is  free  anyway ; 
is  the  freeman  of  the  Lord  (Christ),  because  "in  the 
Lord  "  he  has  been  "  called."  Let  him  not  take  it  to  heart 
that  he  is  a  slave,  but  if  he  have  an  opportunity  to  be 
made  free,  let  him  rather  remain  in  bondage.     Free  and 


42  THE   MAN 

enslaved  are  alike  servants  of  Christ.  For  the  apostle 
this  point  of  view  dominates  the  whole  discussion  of  the 
subject,  and  excludes  consideration  of  it  from  any  other. 
Being  "  bought  with  a  price  "  (that  paid  by  Jesus  on  the 
cross),  slaves  should  regard  themselves  as  Christ's  servants, 
and  not  feel  and  act  as  if  they  were  the  servants  of  men 
(i  Cor.  vii.  21-23). 

In  approaching  the  delicate  subject  of  the  claims  of  the 
women  in  the  church  in  Corinth  to  an  equality  with  men 
in  the  religious  assemblies,  the  apostle  praises  the  be- 
lievers for  having  kept  the  ordinances  which  he  had 
delivered  to  them,  thus  smoothing  his  way  to  the  discus- 
sion of  a  difficult  matter,  which  it  seems  had  not  presented 
itself  elsewhere,  since  the  custom  in  question  was  un- 
known to  "the  churches  of  God"  (i  Cor.  xi.  i,  16).  Here 
again  the  method  previously  referred  to  is  adopted.  In 
taking  ground  against  the  claims  of  the  women  and  the 
advocates  of  their  cause  whom  they  may  be  presumed  to 
have  had  in  a  party  among  the  men,  he  passes  over  the 
numerous  practical  considerations  which  he  might  have 
adduced,  and  rests  his  entire  argument  upon  a  theological 
doctrine.  Accordingly,  he  begins  with  the  declaration  : 
'*  I  would  have  you  know  that  the  head  of  every  man  is 
Christ,  and  the  head  of  the  woman  is  the  man,  and  the 
head  of  Christ  is  God."  He  does  not  offer  proof  of  this 
proposition,  and  appears  to  have  expected  it  to  be  accepted 
on  his  authority.  Incidentally,  he  establishes  from  Script- 
ure the  principle  that  the  man  is  the  head  of  the  woman, 
when  he  says,  "the  man  is  not  of  the  woman,  but  the 
woman  of  the  man  "  (verse  8),  evidently  with  reference  to 
the  story  of  woman's  creation  (Gen.  ii.  21  f.).  The  two 
other  principles  in  the  proposition  he  probably  derived 
from  the  Jewish  theology,  according  to  which  the  two- 
fold account  of  the  creation  of  man  in  Genesis  (i.  26  and 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  43 

ii.  7)  was  to  be  interpreted  in  the  sense  that  one  of  them 
related  the  creation  of  the  Messiah,  Paul's  "  second  Adam," 
and  the  other  that  of  the  progenitor  of  the  human  race, 
Paul's  "  first  Adam  "  (i  Cor.  xv.  46,  47).  Since,  according  to 
Paul,  Christ  was  "the  image  of  God"  (2  Cor.  iv.  4),  it  is 
an  easy  step  to  the  principle  that  God,  the  Creator  of  this 
second  Adam,  might  be  called  his  ''head."  It  is  not  so 
evident,  however,  how  the  relation  of  Christ  to  man  as  his 
''head"  was  conceived.  He  says  that  the  man  is  "the 
image  and  glory  of  God  "  (verse  7),  which  the  woman  of 
course  is  not.  He  is,  then,  in  this  respect  like  Christ ; 
but  being  of  the  earth,  earthy,  and  "  natural  "  or  "  psychi- 
cal," while  Christ  is  the  "  heavenly,"  "  spiritual  "  man,  he  is 
subordinate  to  him,  and  Christ  may  be  called  his  "head." 
Such  may  have  been  the  course  of  the  apostle's  thought. 

We  are  especially  concerned  here,  however,  with  calling 
attention  to  the  apostle's  method  of  dealing  with  the  ques- 
tion that  had  been  proposed  to  him.  His  reasoning  from 
above  downward  does  not  appear  to  be  very  lucid  when  he 
comes  to  the  particular  application  of  it.  It  is  not  clear  why 
a  man  dishonours  his  "head"  (Christ)  by  praying  covered, 
and  the  woman  dishonours  her  "  head  "  (the  man)  by  pray- 
ing uncovered ;  and  the  matter  is  not  made  any  clearer  by 
the  declaration  that  "  a  man  ought  not  to  cover  his  head, 
forasmuch  as  he  is  the  image  and  glory  of  God,"  but  that 
the  woman  ought  to  have  hers  covered  because  she  is 
"  the  glory  of  the  man "  (verse  7).  The  woman,  being 
"created  for  the  man,"  ought  to  "have  power  on  her 
head,"  that  is,  a  covering  as  the  symbol  of  man's  power 
over  her  or  of  her  subordination.  Yet  the  argument  runs 
to  the  effect  that  man's  subordination  to  his  "  head " 
(Christ)  is  shown  by  his  being  uncovered  in  worship. 
One  cannot,  moreover,  but  feel  the  extreme  hardness  and 
severity  of   the   remark,  that   for  a  woman   to    pray   or 


44  THE  MAN 

prophesy  with  her  head  uncovered  is  the  same  as  if  she 
were  shaven,  which  can  only  mean,  according  to  the 
custom  of  the  time,  that  it  is  the  same  as  if  she  classed 
herself  among  disreputable  women.  In  view  of  the  fact 
that  the  women  in  the  Corinthian  church  who  made  the 
claim  of  equality  with  men  in  religious  worship  (and  there 
appears  to  be  no  reason  for  supposing  that  an  assertion  of 
*' equal  rights  "  in  general  had  been  made)  proceeded  upon 
a  doctrine  of  the  apostle  himself  that  in  Christ  there  is 
"neither  male  nor  female"  (Gal.  iii.  28),  and  that  they 
were  very  likely  sincere  and  devout,  the  harshness  of  this 
saying  is  set  in  a  still  more  vivid  light. 

In  the  directions  given  to  the  Corinthians  concerning 
idolatry  and  the  eating  of  flesh  offered  in  sacrifice  to  idols 
the  apostle  employs  his  favourite  dialectical  method,  the 
argument  from  a  principle  which  is  followed  to  its  utmost 
consequences ;  but  it  is  interesting  to  observe  here  that  at 
the  end  of  the  discussion  the  practical  Christian  idea  of 
fraternal  consideration  for  the  welfare  of  others  is  made 
prominent.  The  fundamental  doctrine  is  that  as  Christians 
the  cup  of  blessing  is  ''  the  communion  of  the  blood  of 
Christ "  ;  and  the  bread  is  "  the  communion  of  his  body  "  ; 
just  as  in  "  Israel  after  the  flesh  "  they  who  eat  of  the 
sacrifices  are  partakers  of  the  altar  (i  Cor.  x.  16-33,  viii. 
4-13).  Hence  the  absurdity  of  the  idea  that  the  Chris- 
tians could  at  the  same  time  ''  drink  of  the  cup  of  the  Lord 
and  the  cup  of  devils."  Then,  after  turning  aside  from 
his  argument  to  insert  a  threat  in  the  questions :  ''  Do  we 
provoke  the  Lord  [Christ]  to  jealousy .?  are  we  stronger 
than  he  .'* "  he  lays  down  the  practical  doctrine  that  while 
all  things  are  lawful  to  him,  "  all  things  are  not  expedient ; 
all  things  edify  not,"  and  gives  the  eminently  Christian 
direction :  "  Let  no  man  seek  his  own,  but  every  man 
another's,"     His  indifference  on  principle  to  the  eating  of 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  45 

flesh  offered  to  idols  is  indicated  in  the  teaching  that  the 
beHevers  may  ''eat  whatsoever  is  sold  in  the  shambles, 
asking  no  questions,"  and  that  they  may  eat  whatever  is 
set  before  them  at  a  feast  of  unbelievers ;  but  if  they  are 
told  that  the  flesh  has  been  offered  to  idols,  they  are  not 
to  eat  it  *'  for  his  sake  that  showed  it  and  for  conscience' 
sake."  One  can  hardly  help  feeling  that  there  is  an  in- 
consistency here.  For  if  the  prohibition  in  question  is  at 
all  a  matter  of  conscience  (whether  the  conscience  of  the 
weaker  or  that  of  the  stronger  be  meant),  the  believer  is 
inexcusable  on  moral  grounds  for  not  "asking  questions" 
and  ascertaining  whether  he  is  doing  the  forbidden  thing 
or  not.  The  reason  given  by  the  apostle  why  a  Christian 
may  eat  whatever  is  offered  in  the  market,  "asking  no 
questions  for  conscience'  sake,"  is  characteristic  of  his 
method.  He  quotes  from  Ps.  xxiv.  i,  "The  earth  is  the 
Lord's  and  the  fulness  thereof,"  in  a  sense  not  intended 
by  the  psalmist,  —  all  things  are  Christ's,  and  do  not  be- 
long to  idols  or  demons.  But  the  second  application  of 
the  quotation  to  the  case  where  the  eating  is  forbidden  "for 
conscience'  sake  "  is  inept  and  forced.*  Finally  the  matter 
is  brought  under  a  religious  principle,  and  the  injunction 
is  given  to  the  believers,  "Whether,  therefore,  ye  eat  or 
drink,  or  whatsoever  ye  do,  do  all  to  the  glory  of  God  " 
(i  Cor.  X.  31).  Offence  should  be  given  to  none,  whether 
Jews  or  gentiles,  and  especially  not  "to  the  church  of 
God,"  "  even  as  I  please  all  men  in  all  things,  not  seeking 
my  own  profit  but  the  profit  of  the  many,  that  they  may 
be  saved  "  —  a  distinct  disclosure  of  the  chief  aim  of  the 
apostle's  life  from  the  time  he  engaged  in  the  service  of 
Christ. 

*  Since  "  the  earth  is  the  Lord's  and  the  fulness  thereof,"  eat  not  of  flesh 
sacrificed  to  idols  when  informed  of  its  character,  on  account  of  the  conscience 
of  him  who  informed  you  ! 


4.6  THE   MAN 

In  dealing  with  the  question  of  spiritual  "gifts,"  which 
had  evidently  caused  no  little  trouble  at  Corinth,  the 
apostle  characteristically  sets  out  from  the  general  principle 
that  "there  are  diversities  of  gifts,  but  the  same  Spirit." 
In  all  administrations  of  the  church  there  is  the  one  Lord 
Christ,  so  that  the  fact  that  there  are  different  manifesta- 
tions does  not  prejudice  the  principle  that  all  have  the 
Spirit.  Those,  then,  who  are  gifted  with  the  more  strik- 
ing and  prominent  charism  of  speaking  "with  a  tongue  " 
should  not  exalt  their  "  gift "  too  much,  and  depreciate 
others,  the  expression  of  which  was  less  obtrusive.  Just 
as  all  parts  of  the  body  are  essential  to  the  unity  and 
strength  of  the  whole  organism,  so  all  the  various  gifts 
have  their  place  in  the  body  of  Christ,  the  church.  In 
assigning  by  a  skilful  and  tactful  course  of  reasoning  the 
speaking  with  a  tongue  to  its  proper,  that  is,  subordinate, 
place  among  the  gifts  he  gives  the  practical  interest  pre- 
dominance. All  gifts  should  be  so  employed  that  "the 
church  may  receive  edifying."  The  man  who  "  prophe- 
sies"  "  speaketh  unto  men  to  edification  and  exhortation 
and  comfort."  But  the  ecstatic  who  speaks  "  with  a  tongue  " 
only  "  edifieth  himself."  "Even  so  ye,  forasmuch  as  ye 
are  zealous  of  spiritual  gifts,  seek  that  ye  may  excel  to  the 
edifying  of  the  church."  He  thanks  God  that  he  speaks 
with  a  tongue  more  than  they  all,  yet  he  says  that  in  the 
church  he  would  rather  speak  five  words  with  his  under- 
standing, that  by  his  voice  he  might  teach  others,  than  ten 
thousand  words  in  a  tongue.  The  picture  is  forcible  of  a 
"  whole  church  "  raving  together  in  this  ecstasy,  while  "  un- 
believers "  looking  on  say  that  they  are  "mad."  "But  if 
all  prophesy,  and  there  come  in  one  that  believeth  not  or 
one  unlearned,  he  is  convinced  of  all,  he  is  judged  of  all." 
Finally,  the  sum  of  the  whole  matter  is  the  practical  pre- 
cept, "  Let  all  things  be  done  to  edifying  "  (i  Cor.  xii.  xiv.). 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  47 

It  must  be  conceded,  however,  that  the  concessions  made 
to  the  merely  external  manifestations  of  the  so-called 
*' gifts  of  the  Spirit  "  accord  to  them  more  recognition  than 
is  conducive  to  the  welfare  of  the  church,  whether  it  be 
the  church  of  the  first  or  of  any  succeeding  century. 

The  concluding  portion  of  2  Corinthians  (x.  i-xiii.  10), 
which  is  so  different  in  tone  from  the  preceding  chapters 
as  to  furnish  strong  support  to  the  hypothesis  that  it  origi- 
nally had  no  connection  with  them,  and  is  in  fact  a 
separate  letter,  reveals  striking  traits  of  the  apostle's  per- 
sonality, and  shows  how  unsparingly  he  could  deal  with 
refractory  elements  in  his  churches.  He  evidently  re- 
gards it  as  an  humiliation  that  he  must  boast  of  himself,  of 
his  revelations  and  privations  and  labours,  and. he  exclaims  : 
"  I  am  become  a  fool  in  glorying  ;  ye  have  compelled  me  ; 
for  I  ought  to  have  been  commended  of  you."  They  had 
been  receiving,  some  of  them  evidently  with  favour,  his 
opponents,  the  judaisers,  the  ministers  of  Satan  (2  Cor. 
xi.  15),  and  he  says  that  "  seeing  that  many  glory  after  the 
flesh,"  he  will  glory  also;  for,  he  adds,  **ye  suffer  fools 
gladly,  seeing  ye  yourselves  are  wise  "  (verses  18,  19).  This 
is  a  biting  sarcasm.  Since  they  listen  to  the  boasting  of 
other  fools,  his  opponents,  they  will  doubtless  suffer  him 
in  their  superior  wisdom  to  make  a  fool  of  himself  by 
boasting  like  the  others.  The  irony  is  apparent  in  the 
correct  rendering  of  xi.  4 :  ''  For  if  he  that  cometh  [the 
judaiser]  preach  another  Jesus  whom  we  have  not  preached, 
or  if  ye  receive  another  Spirit  which  ye  have  not  received, 
or  another  gospel  which  ye  have  not  accepted,  ye  bore  it 
well";  did  finely  to  take  pleasure  in  a  gospel  hostile  to 
mine.  **  You  bear  it,"  he  tells  them,  ''if  a  man  bring 
you  into  bondage,  if  a  man  devour  you,  if  a  man  take  you 
[capture  you],  if  a  man  exalt  himself,  if  a  man  smite  you 
on  the  face  "  (xi.  20).     He  fears  that  when  he  comes  they 


48  THE  MAN 

will  find  him  as  they  would  not  hke  to  find  him,  and  to  *'  those 
who  have  sinned  and  to  all  others"  he  announces  that  if 
he  comes  again  he  ''will  not  spare"  (xii.  21,  xiii.  2). 
Finally  he  tells  them  to  examine  themselves  and  see 
whether  they  be  really  Christians  or  ''  in  the  faith."  They 
ought  to  know  that  unless  they  are  ''reprobates"  Jesus 
Christ  is  in  them,  and  he  intends  to  let  them  see  that  he 
himself  is  at  least  not  a  reprobate.  According  to  his  pro- 
fession (xii.  15),  we  must  regard  all  this  as  the  language  of 
wounded  affection. 

The  apostle's  style  is  characteristic  of  the  man  in  a 
greater  degree  than  that  of  most  writers,  and  this  for  the 
reason  that  he  knew  and  would  know  nothing  of  the  art  of 
concealing  himself.  To  him  language  was  not  "  invented 
to  conceal  thought,"  but  thought  was  invented  to  shape, 
to  master,  to  crush  language.  His  style  is  that  of  one  who 
did  not  think  of  style  because  possessed  and  dominated  by 
the  ideas  that  he  wished  to  express.  All  graces  and  artifi- 
ces are  foreign  to  it.  The  polished  rhetoricians  of  the  Greek 
schools  would  have  been  shocked  at  the  way  in  which  he 
treated  their  language.  Renan's  remark  is  doubtless  some- 
what extravagant,  that  "  it  is  impossible  to  violate  more  au- 
daciously, I  will  not  say  the  genius  of  the  Greek  language, 
but  the  logic  of  human  language."  The  genius  of  the 
Greek  language  could  certainly  not  have  consideration  from 
one  who  could  never  get  rid  of  the  Hebrew  idiom.  He 
had  not,  moreover,  the  imagination  which  is  essential  to 
the  production  of  a  fine  literary  style.  When  we  add  to 
this  that  his  letters  were  often  dictated  in  haste  and  under 
great  excitement,  so  that  they  have  been  compared  to  "  a 
rapid  conversation  stenographically  reported  and  repro- 
duced without  correction,"  it  is  a  marvel  that  the  blem- 
ishes are  so  few.  His  intense  preoccupation  with  his 
theme,  which  rendered  him  re^rardless  sometimes  of  the 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  49 

logical  connection  of  his  thought,  could  not  but  react 
upon  his  style,  may,  in  fact,  be  said  to  a  degree  to  have 
constituted  it.  Hence  the  want  of  sequence,  the  breaks 
and  jerks,  *'the  harshness  and  roughness  which  suggest 
that  the  thought  is  far  too  weighty  for  the  language,  and 
can  scarcely  find  fit  form  for  the  superabundant  matter  it 
would  express."  It  is  this  23reoccupation  often  with  a  dog- 
matic idea  which  leads  him  to  make  sweeping  statements 
without  considering  whether  or  no  they  are  in  accord  with 
what  he  has  elsewhere  said.  Hence  the  paradoxes  or  an- 
tinomies of  his  teaching,  which  must  always  remain  stum- 
bling-blocks to  the  theologians  who  study  him  with  the  pre- 
supposition that  his  writings  contain  a  system  of  doctrine 
which  is  throughout  accordant  and  consistent  with  itself. 
He  had  not  time  to  consider  whether  he  was  consistent 
with  himself  or  no,  and  as  for  formulating  a  doctrinal  sys- 
tem or  even  writing  a  sacred  and  infallible  literature, 
nothing  was  farther  from  his  thought.  It  would  be  im- 
possible for  a  man,  in  whose  mind  the  Jewish  theology 
and  various  Hellenistic  speculations  lay  unreconciled,  not 
to  leave  such  an  antinomy  as  that  death  is  the  penalty  of 
sin,  and  that  man  is  naturally  mortal  on  account  of  the 
perishable  nature  of  the  flesh.  But  he  was  greater  than 
all  speculation,  and  all  paradoxes,  and  all  theologies.  He 
could  afford  to  perpetrate  antinomies  and  to  write  in  a 
style  which,  like  himself,  was  both  Hebraic  and  Grecian. 
It  was  because  he  was  both  Greek  and  Hebrew,  and  had  a 
far-seeing  vision,  which  looked  beyond  the  making  of  a  the- 
ology, and  a  great  love  that  embraced  mankind,  that  he 
became  the  conqueror  of  the  world.  It  was  because  he 
saw  in  the  cross  the  symbol  of  redemption  for  gentiles  as 
well  as  Jews  and  in  the  Abrahamic  promise  an  all-inclu- 
sive divine  purpose,  and  because  he  was  great  enough  and 
kind  enough  to  become   ''all  things  to   all  men,  that  he 


50  THE   MAN 

might  save  some,"  that  through  him  the  gospel  of  Jesus 
became  a  rehgion  for  the  world  instead  of  the  possession 
of  a  Jewish  sect. 

The  portraiture  of  Paul's  personality  is  not  completed, 
or  his  influence  accounted  for  by  regarding  him  simply  as 
a  theologian  and  the  author  of  a  new  interpretation,  one 
may  even  say  a  transformation,  of  the  gospel  of  Jesus. 
A  sketch  of  his  teaching  and  his  missionary  work  furnishes 
only  a  bare  outline,  meagre  and  cold,  until  it  is  filled  with 
the  religious  content  which  was  the  vital  principle  of  his 
character,  the  mainspring  of  his  activity,  and  the  source  of 
his  power.  He  can  never  be  understood  until  he  is  inter- 
preted out  of  his  personal  experience,  that  is,  until  his  in- 
terpreter recognises  the  fact  that  his  doctrine,  far  from 
being  an  independent  structure  to  be  studied  by  itself  apart 
from  all  living  motives,  is  the  attempt  of  a  powerful  in- 
tellect to  put  into  an  objective  form  what  was  most  vital  in 
his  religious  consciousness,  to  give  an  outward  expression 
to  an  inward  life  in  God.  It  could  not  be  otherwise  than 
that  his  religion  was  experienced  to  some  degree  in  subor- 
dination to  his  thought,  and  took  on  the  colour  of  his  doc- 
trine. Accordingly,  while  in  its  essence  it  reproduces  the 
old,  eternal  experience  of  the  human  soul,  in  some  of  its 
forms  and  expressions  it  has  the  transient  character  of  cer- 
tain of  his  theological  conclusions.  The  revelation  of  the 
Son  of  God  in  him  (Gal.  i.  15  f.)  was  a  revelation  of 
God's  love  for  him  and  for  mankind,  which  he  interpreted 
in  the  sense  that  "■  God  commendeth  His  love  toward  us  in 
that,  while  we  were  yet  sinners,  Christ  died  for  us  "  (Rom. 
v.  8).  Through  Christ  the  believer  has  ''  access  "  to  God 
and  "  peace  "  with  Him,  and  His  "  love  is  shed  abroad  in  the 
heart "  (Rom.  v.  i  f.).  The  mystic  fellowship  with  Christ, 
whose  outward  symbol  is  baptism,  is  a  "newness  of  life," 
in  the  experience  of  which  he  conceived  himself  to  be  "  dead 


PERSONAL    TRAITS  5 1 

to  sin,  but  alive  to  God."  Being  made  free  from  sin  he 
would  henceforth  be  ''the  servant  of  righteousness,"  and 
have  his  "  fruit  unto  holiness  "  (Rom.  vi.  3,  4,  11,  22).  In 
his  death  with  Christ  to  the  flesh  the  old,  sinful  life  with 
its  fruitless  struggle  and  bondage  was  put  away,  and  in 
the  gift  of  the  divine  Spirit  was  brought  into  his  being  a 
new  religious  principle  which  contained  infinite  possibili- 
ties of  blessedness  and  of  victory.  By  virtue  of  this  in- 
dwelling power  the  "  deeds  of  the  body "  are  overcome, 
and  that  "  life  "  is  attained  which  is  "  hid  with  Christ  in 
God,"  and  which  in  the  end  overcomes  "the  last  enemy," 
death.  The  summit  of  religious  experience  is  reached  in 
the  "witness"  of  this  Spirit  with  his  spirit  that  he  was  a 
child  of  God ;  for  "  as  many  as  are  led  by  the  Spirit  of 
God,  they  are  the  sons  of  God."  Here  was  a  source  of 
strength  to  him  to  do  and  dare  and  suffer  all  things.  "  If 
God  be  for  us,  who  can  be  against  us }  He  that  spared 
not  His  own  Son,  but  freely  gave  him  up  for  us  all,  how 
shall  He  not  with  him  also  freely  give  us  all  things } " 
The  love  of  God  was  not  only  shed  abroad  in  his  heart, 
but  it  also  made  him  "more  than  conqueror,"  and  was  a 
protection  round  about  him  in  which  he  lived  and  worked 
secure  from  the  machinations  of  the  "  principalities  and 
powers "  of  the  realm  of  darkness,  and  from  which 
"  neither  height  nor  depth  nor  any  other  creature  "  could 
separate  him  (Rom.  viii.  13-16,  31-39).  In  this  religious 
experience  faith  was  a  pivotal  principle,  "  a  new  point  of 
gravity."  It  was  an  indestructible  trust  in  the  love  of 
God,  through  whom  came  the  "atonement,"  and  a  confi- 
dence in  the  divine  promise  inclusive  of  gentiles  as  well  as 
of  Jews.  Through  this  Paul  conceived  a  new  righteous- 
ness to  be  attained,  "  if  not  by  way  of  the  law,  then  by 
way  of  God" — a  righteousness  which  if  not  expounded 
by  him  to  our  comprehension,  was  yet  to  him  a  reality  and 


52  THE   MAN 

an  inalienable  possession.  Yet  the  real  spring  of  his  life 
was  **  the  Spirit  of  Christ,"  the  love  which  "  believeth  all 
things,  hopeth  all  things,  endureth  all  things,"  and  is 
greater  than  the  faith  that  rests  in  God  and  the  hope  that 
lays  hold  on  the  coming  kingdom. 


CHAPTER   III 

THE   CONVERSION 

THE  most  important  event  in  Christian  history  next  to 
the  birth  of  Jesus,  the  conversion  of  Paul,  is  involved 
in  the  obscurity  that  attaches  to  all  spiritual  processes  which 
the  subject  of  them  cannot  adequately  explain  to  himself, 
much  less  to  others.  It  does  not  appear  from  the  apos- 
tle's own  writings  that  he  wished  to  make  to  others  any  dis- 
closures as  to  the  character  and  details  of  this  great  expe- 
rience. Rather  with  a  delicacy  which  the  writer  of  Acts 
does  not  attribute  to  him  he  appears  to  shrink  from  such  a 
proceeding,  and  we  have  only  allusions  to  the  fact  of  the 
change  that  throw  little  light  upon  its  antecedents  or  its 
process.  It  is  probable  that  the  prominence  of  Paul  in 
the  early  church  may  have  been  the  occasion  of  more  im- 
portance being  attached  to  his  conversion  than  he  attached 
to  it  himself,  or  than  was  warrantable  under  the  circum- 
stances. The  conversion  of  a  Jew  to  Christianity  was  not 
so  unusual  at  the  time  that  there  was  any  occasion  for 
proclaiming  the  fact  as  a  miracle  ;  and  if  the  church  had 
never  had  the  accounts  of  Paul's  conversion  in  Acts, 
which  show  how  the  event  was  regarded  a  half-century  or  so 
after  it  happened,  and  how  tradition  had  given  the  occur- 
rence a  legendary  form  and  embellishment,  no  one  would 
have  thought  of  resorting  to  a  miracle  to  explain  it.  It  is 
worthy  of  note  as  a  fact  generally  overlooked  in  the  dis- 
cussion of  the  matter  that  Paul  does  not  anywhere  men- 
tion a  conversion,  but  says  that  Christ  was  *'  seen  "  of  him 

53 


54  THE  MAN 

and  "  revealed  "  in  him  (i  Cor.  xv.  8  ;  Gal.  i.  i6).  Whether 
these  events  coincided  with  his  first  believing  in  Christian- 
ity or  not  he  does  not  say.  He  does  not  tell  us,  and  we 
do  not  know,  but  that  these  revelations  and  visions  were 
subsequent  to  his  acceptance  of  Christianity  and  con- 
nected with  his  call  to  the  apostleship  to  the  gentiles. 

For  the  question  why  Paul  became  an  apostle  is  legiti- 
mate, although  the  answer  to  it  can  be  only  conjecture. 
Many  Jews  were  converted  who  do  not  appear  to  have 
thought  of  being  apostles.  Why,  moreover,  should  he 
have  felt  called  to  be  the  apostle  to  the  gentiles .?  Accord- 
ing to  his  own  statement  this  idea  of  a  gentile  apostleship 
was  inseparably  connected  with  the  revelation  of  Christ  in 
him ;  for  his  words  are :  *'  When  it  pleased  God  ...  to 
reveal  His  Son  in  me,  that  I  might  preach  him  among  the 
heathen"  (Gal.  i.  15,  16).  He  says  nothing  here  of  a  con- 
version to  Christianity,  but  evidently  has  in  mind  the  great 
theme  which  on  this  occasion  was  of  paramount  impor- 
tance,—  his  call  to  the  apostleship  to  the  gentiles.  In  the 
entire  connection  of  the  passage  in  question,  which  is  the 
one  generally  referred  to  as  containing  his  own  most  im- 
portant words  on  his  ''conversion,"  he  speaks  only  of  his 
apostleship,  or  rather  of  his  call  to  the  apostleship,  declar- 
ing that  he  is  **  an  apostle  not  of  men,  neither  by  man,  but 
by  Jesus  Christ  and  God  the  Father,  who  raised  him  from 
the  dead"  (Gal.  i.  i).  He  says  furthermore  that  the  gos- 
pel which  he  preaches  is  not  after  man,  neither  was  he 
taught  it,  but  by  the  revelation  of  Jesus  Christ  (Gal.  i.  12). 
Weizsacker's  conclusion  that  since  he  uses  the  same  terms 
in  speaking  of  his  apostleship  and  of  his  gospel,  he  must 
in  that  passage  refer  to  his  becoming  a  Christian  or  his 
acceptance  of  the  gospel,  is  not  valid.  For  his  apostleship 
and  his  gospel  were  the  apostleship  and  the  gospel  to  the 
gentiles,  and  it  is  a    gratuitous  assumption   that   his  dis- 


THE    CONVERSION  55 

tinctive  apprehension  of  the  gospel  came  to  him  at  the 
moment  of  his  conversion.  We  know  that  he  did  not 
immediately  begin  the  gentile  mission,  but  that  he 
"  went  into  Arabia,  and  returned  again  to  Damascus " 
(Gal.  i.  17). 

If  by  the  conversion  of  Paul  one  means  his  acceptance 
of  his  distinctive  apprehension  of  Christianity,  the  gospel 
and  the  apostleship  to  the  gentiles,  one  should  hesitate  to 
designate  it  with  Weizsacker  as  "  sudden."  It  was  essen- 
tially different  from  the  change  from  an  evil  to  a  virtuous 
course  of  life  of  a  man  in  whose  consciousness  there  is 
an  accumulation  of  good  ethical  influences  and  precepts 
which  only  await  the  right  occasion  to  assert  themselves. 
It  was  different  from  the  ordinary  conversion  of  Jews  to 
Christianity.  His  "gospel"  was  fundamentally  different 
from  that  of  the  Jewish  Christians  in  general.  The  change 
that  took  place  in  him  was  radical,  and  this  fact  furnishes 
a  presumption  against  its  suddenness  and  in  favour  of  the 
hypothesis  that  in  its  completeness  it  was  the  result  of  a 
series  of  impressions,  influences,  and  reflections.  Weiz- 
sacker, in  commenting  on  the  passage  in  Gal.  i.  15,  16, 
says  that  Paul  in  writing  this  *'  is  conscious  of  no  transition- 
period  of  wavering  reflection  and  questioning,  but  the  time 
of  his  persecution  is  immediately  connected  in  his  life 
with  his  belief  and  his  apostleship  "  {Apostol.  Zeitalter,  2te 
Aufl.,  p.  6%).  But  it  is  evident  that  in  this  passage  the 
apostle  is  not  giving  an  account  of  his  conversion  with  the 
intention  of  indicating  the  sequence  of  events  in  time. 
He  says  that  he  had  persecuted  the  church,  that  he  had 
been  exceedingly  zealous  of  the  traditions  of  his  fathers, 
and  that  when  he  felt  called  to  be  an  apostle  to  the  gen- 
tiles he  "did  not  confer  with  flesh  and  blood."  We  must 
not  put  too  strict  an  interpretation  upon  a  mere  allusion 
like  this,  which  is  devoid  of  all  details.     One  is  as  much 


56  THE  MAN 

justified  in  reading  into  it  a  series  of  events  as  in  binding 
the  several  stages  inseparably  together. 

The  same  writer  concludes  from  Paul's  words  in  the 
first  chapter  of  Galatians,  that  his  conversion  was  inde- 
pendent of  anything  that  he  may  have  learned  from  men 
concerning  Christ,  and  infers  from  the  first  verse  that  the 
certainty  of  the  resurrection  of  Jesus  was  the  content  of 
the  "  revelation  "  that  he  received.  But  Paul's  declaration 
that  he  did  not  receive  his  *'  gospel  "  from  man  does  not 
exclude  a  knowledge  gained  in  a  natural  way  of  the  man 
Jesus,  the  Jesus  "  after  the  flesh,"  his  claims,  his  work, 
his  crucifixion,  and  his  resurrection.  That  he  should  have 
persecuted  the  Christians  without  a  very  good  knowledge 
of  their  beliefs  is  contrary  to  all  that  we  know  of  his  char- 
acter and  his  conscientiousness.  But  if  it  be  admitted  that 
he  was  thus  informed,  it  is  evident  that  this  knowledge 
could  not  have  been  without  an  influence  upon  him,  and 
could  not  but  have  given  rise  in  such  a  mind  as  his  to 
''reflection  and  questioning."  It  must  be  questioned 
whether  under  such  circumstances  the  "revelation"  which 
Paul  says  he  received  was  "the  cause  of  the  entire  de- 
cision, entering  suddenly  and  unexpectedly."  We  can 
easily  conceive  of  the  crisis  as  sudden,  when  the  accumu- 
lated influences  which  induced  it  were  ready  to  discharge 
themselves,  and  preceding  "  reflection  and  questioning " 
culminated,  as  in  a  logical  and  courageous  mind  they  must, 
in  the  urgent  pressure  to  a  decision ;  but  a  sudden  "  reve- 
lation "  that  the  Jesus  whom  he  was  persecuting  in  the 
person  of  his  followers  was  the  true  Messiah,  that  he  had 
been  crucified  "to  deliver  us  from  this  present  evil  world  " 
(Gal.  i.  4),  and  that  he  had  been  raised  from  the  dead,  to 
one  who  had  learned  nothing  of  the  matter  "from  men," 
and  had  not  reflected  and  questioned  with  conscientious 
anxiety  to  know  the  truth,  can  only  with  difficulty  be 
shown  to  be  probable. 


THE    CONVERSION  57 

It  is  superficially  apparent  from  the  apostle's  words  in 
Galatians  that  he  did  not  regard  his  undertaking  of  the 
apostleship  to  the  gentiles  as  an  act  of  his  own  self-de- 
termination, and  his  preparation  for  it  as  acquired  in  an 
altogether  natural  way,  whether  by  his  own  study  and 
meditation  or  by  instruction  from  others.  He  says  ex- 
plicitly of  his  gospel  that  he  "was  not  taught  it,"  but  that 
he  had  it  "by  revelation  of  Jesus  Christ."  These  words, 
however,  must  be  interpreted,  and  we  have  fortunately 
other  sayings  of  his  of  a  somewhat  similar  purport,  which 
throw  a  little  light  upon  them.  It  is  important  to  ascer- 
tain as  nearly  as  possible  what  psychological  conditions  he 
connected  with  the  "  revelations  "  that  he  claims  to  have 
received.  We  have  already  seen  that  in  2  Cor.  xii.  1-4 
he  relates  that  he  had  "visions  and  revelations  of  the 
Lord"  (Christ)  under  circumstances  which  undoubtedly 
indicate  abnormal  physical  conditions,  since  he  connects 
them  with  a  disease,  which  he  calls  "  a  thorn  in  the  flesh." 
He  declares  that  he  does  not  know  whether  when  he  had 
these  visions  and  revelations  he  was  "  in  the  body  or  out 
of  the  body,"  and  we  can  of  course  attach  no  objective 
importance  to  his  reference  to  the  current  Jewish  ideas  of 
"the  third  heaven"  and  "paradise."  It  appears,  then, 
that  some  of  the  "revelations"  that  he  had  were  received 
during  a  suspension  of  his  normal  consciousness.  The 
numerous  cases  on  record  of  similar  phenomena  render  it 
hazardous  to  maintain  that  his  experience  was  altogether 
exceptional  and  supernatural,  and  throw  the  burden  of 
proof  upon  him  who  would  support  the  affirmative  of  this 
proposition.  The  question  is,  what  did  Paul  mean  by  a 
"revelation  "  t  and  we  have  in  this  passage  from  the  sec- 
ond Corinthian  letter  the  answer,  that  he  sometimes  meant 
what  he  experienced  under  conditions  familiar  to  physi- 
cians who    have    studied    abnormal  physico-psychological 


58  THE   MAN 

phenomena.  That  he  saw  in  these  visions  what  he  had 
never  before  thought  of,  is  far  from  being  as  probable 
as  that  the  revelations  were  an  intensification  of  ideas 
prominent  in  his  normal  thinking.  The  mention  of  "  the 
third  heaven"  and  ''paradise"  is  proof  of  this  latter 
hypothesis,  for  these  were  ideas  which  he  derived  from 
his  Jewish  environment,  and  he  does  not  intimate  that 
these  fictitious  localities  were  made  known  to  him  in  the 
revelations,  but  only  ''unspeakable  words  which  it  is  not 
lawful  for  man  to  utter." 

Another  instance  of  a  revelation  is  mentioned  by  the 
apostle  in  his  account  of  his  visit  to  Jerusalem  to  defend 
his  gospel  against  the  judaisers  of  that  church.  He  says 
simply :  "  And  I  went  up  by  revelation,  and  communi- 
cated to  them  that  gospel  which  I  preach  among  the 
gentiles "  (Gal.  ii.  2).  From  this  bare  statement  we  can- 
not determine  whether  the  "revelation"  in  question  was 
received  under  conditions  similar  to  those  implied  in  the 
passage  in  second  Corinthians  or  not.  One  thing  is,  how- 
ever, in  the  highest  degree  probable,  and  that  is  that  the 
matter  in  question  was  one  that  had  intensely  occupied 
his  thought  and  deeply  moved  him.  The  attitude  toward 
his  mission  to  the  gentiles,  which  prevailed  in  Jerusalem, 
was  a  matter  about  which  he  was  greatly  concerned.  It 
was  the  question  whether  the  work  which  lay  so  near  his 
heart  was  to  be  overcome  and  rendered  futile  by  hostile 
influences,  whether,  in  his  own  words,  he  "  by  any  means 
should  run,  or  had  run,  in  vain  "  (Gal.  ii.  2).  Now  it  is 
manifestly  impossible  for  us  to  determine  whether  or  not, 
from  his  strictly  theistic  point  of  view,  from  which  second 
causes  were  disregarded,  and  phenomena  were  attributed 
to  direct  divine  intervention,  he  ascribed  to  a  revelation 
from  God  a  profound  conviction  respecting  his  mission, 
that  was    in  fact  the  result  of  his  earnest  reflection.     It 


THE    CONVERSION  59 

is  hazardous  here  to  dogmatise  either  affirmatively  or 
negatively,  and  we  must  leave  the  matter  undecided  with 
calling  attention  to  the  fact  that  neither  the  hypothesis  of 
naturalism  nor  that  of  supernaturalism  is  susceptible  of 
proof.  The  appeal  to  the  apostle's  use  of  the  word 
"revelation  "  in  the  interest  of  the  latter  is  ruled  out,  for 
the  reason  that  it  is  precisely  the  meaning  which  must  be 
attached  to  this  term  that  is  the  question  in  debate. 

In  another  passage,  in  which  the  apostle  is  not  speaking 
of  his  conversion,  but  is  defending  his  claims  to  the  apostle- 
ship  (i  Cor.  ix.  i),  he  asks:  "Am  I  not  an  apostle?  have 
I  not  seen  Jesus  our  Lord.?"  There  is  no  cogent  reason 
for  applying  this  passage  to  his  conversion.  He  may  have 
"  seen  "  the  Lord  in  one  of  the  visions  mentioned  in  2  Cor. 
xii.  I.  But  leaving  this  matter  undecided,  the  question  of 
moment  is  what  he  meant  by  having  "  seen  "  Christ.  In 
I  Cor.  XV.  5-7,  after  mentioning  various  appearances  of 
Jesus  after  his  resurrection,  he  says :  "  And  last  of  all  he 
was  seen  of  me  as  of  one  born  out  of  due  time."  The 
probability  that  he  refers  here  to  the  same  experience 
mentioned  in  Gal.  i.  16  as  God's  revelation  of  His  Son  in 
him  is  so  great  that  it  is  not  worth  while  to  argue  the  case. 
Yet  no  one  would  assume  on  the  ground  of  this  latter  pas- 
sage that  he  had  in  mind  anything  but  an  inward  mani- 
festation, a  conviction,  which  left  the  matter  beyond  all 
question  that  Jesus  was  the  Son  of  God  and  the  Saviour, 
in  the  sense  peculiar  to  his  gospel,  the  gospel  of  the  cross 
and  of  the  uncircumcision.  For  it  was  on  this  revelation 
that  he  grounded  his  apostleship  to  the  gentiles.  In  the 
interpretation  of  "seen"  {M(f)6r])  recourse  must  be  had  to 
the  apostle's  doctrine  of  the  resurrection-body.  In  i  Cor. 
XV.  40,  44  he  says  that  there  are  "terrestrial,"  that  is, 
material,  and  "  celestial  "  bodies,  and  that  the  body  that  is 
"raised"   is   a   "spiritual    body."     He    evidently  did   not 


6o  THE  MAN 

believe  in  the  **  bodily  resurrection  "  in  the  crude  material- 
istic sense  that  the  old  body  of  flesh  was  raised.  ''  Thou 
sowest  not  that  body  that  shall  be  ;  .  .  .  but  God  giveth  it  a 
body  as  it  hath  pleased  Him"  (i  Cor.  xv.  37,  38).  More 
especially  he  says  in  Phil.  iii.  20,  21  that  we  look  for  the 
Saviour  from  heaven  *'  who  shall  change  our  vile  body, 
that  it  may  be  fashioned  like  unto  his  glorious  body"  or 
*'  his  body  of  glory."  It  is  hence  evident  that  he  did  not 
think  of  the  resurrected  Jesus  as  possessing  a  body  of 
corruptible  flesh  which  "  cannot  inherit  the  kingdom  of 
God,"  but  as  clothed  with  a  spiritual  corporeity.  That  he 
conceived  this  spiritual  body  to  be  visible  to  the  eye  of 
flesh  is  improbable  not  only  on  account  of  the  "  in  me  " 
of  Gal.  i.  16,  but  also  from  2  Cor.  iv.  6:  ''For  God  who 
commanded  the  light  to  shine  out  of  darkness  hath  shined 
in  our  hearts  to  give  the  light  of  the  knowledge  of  the 
glory  of  God  in  the  face  of  Jesus  Christ."  The  reference 
of  this  passage  to  his  call  to  the  apostleship,  that  is,  to  his 
profound  **  knowledge  "  of  the  gospel,  cannot  be  doubted. 
The  use  of  the  plural,  ''our  hearts,"  does  not  exclude  this 
reference,  for  in  2  Cor.  iii.  2  he  says,  "  Ye  are  our  epistle 
written  in  our  hearts."  In  any  case  the  experience 
described  is  plainly  an  inward  one,  and  has  no  relation 
to  a  seeing  with  the  eye  of  flesh,  just  as  in  2  Cor.  iii.  18  he 
says  of  himself  and  the  believers  generally:  "  But  we  all 
with  open  face  beholding  as  in  a  glass  the  glory  of  the 
Lord  [Christ],  are  changed  into  the  same  image  from 
glory  to  glory,  as  by  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord,"  that  is,  by 
Christ,  who  is  the  Spirit  (2  Cor.  iii.  17),  and  whose  illumi- 
nation and  transformation  of  the  apostle  and  of  the  be- 
lievers is  conceived  as  effected,  not  through  the  senses, 
but  by  the  inward  working  of  his  power. 

The    change    from   a  persecutor   of   Christianity  to    an 
apostle  was  not  only  an  inward  process,  but  also  a  condi 


THE    CONVERSION  6 1 

tional  or  dependent  one,  —  a  process  determined  by  definite 
antecedents.  Let  this  be  stated  as  an  hypothesis,  and  not 
as  a  dogmatic  affirmation.  We  do  not  know  enough  about 
the  matter  to  warrant  dogmatism  from  any  point  of  view, 
and  we  certainly  cannot  infalHbly  point  out  the  assumed 
antecedents  of  the  crisis.  It  is  legitimate,  however,  to 
undertake  to  show  the  probabilities  that  are  favourable  to 
the  hypothesis.  Before  all,  then,  no  one  will  dispute  the 
proposition  that  Paul's  conversion  to  the  religion  of  Jesus 
had  its  ground  in  his  nature,  as  is  the  case  with  every 
man's  conversion.  Not  every  Jew  persecuting  the  Chris- 
tians would  have  had  Paul's  experience.  Not  every  Jew 
converted  from  a  persecutor  to  a  Christian  would  have 
become  an  apostle.  Not  every  Jew  who  might  have  be- 
come an  apostle,  would  have  become  an  apostle  to  the 
gentiles.  Few  will  have  the  hardihood  to  affirm  that  God 
could  have  made  of  any  Jew  the  great  apostle  to  the 
gentiles.  If  He  could  have  done  it,  we  know  very  well 
that  such  is  not  His  way.  God's  truth  forces  no  man,  but 
it  transforms  and  shapes  to  divine  ends  him  who  has  the 
native  genius  for  it.  The  prophets  and  apostles  are  born 
God-endowed.  No  one  can  read  the  Epistle  to  the 
Romans  without  receiving  a  profound  impression  of  the 
nature,  the  intellectual  character  of  the  author.  Paul 
shows  himself  here  to  be  preeminently  a  reasoner,  a  dia- 
lectician of  a  high  order.  The  probability  that  he  first 
learned  to  reason  after  he  became  a  Christian  is  too  slight 
to  merit  consideration.  But  the  probability  that  such  a 
man  would  have  given  up  the  religion  of  his  race  in  which 
he  was  himself  a  zealot,  and  accepted  in  its  most  radical 
interpretation  another  which  he  was  in  the  act  of  trying  to 
exterminate,  without  reasons  born  of  intense  thought,  few 
will  for  a  moment  entertain.  A  conversion  without  psy- 
chological antecedents  is  not  now  regarded  as  rational  in 


62  THE   MAN 

enlightened  Christian  circles.  We  do  not  think  the  divine 
grace  to  be  independent  in  its  operations  of  subjective 
conditions,  and  we  provide  them  with  no  small  skill. 

We  shall  not  understand  the  conversion  of  Paul  until  we 
approach  it  from  a  similar  point  of  view,  that  is,  until  we 
endeavour  to  ascertain  what  were  the  psychological  condi- 
tions in  his  nature  and  in  his  thinking  prior  to  the  event. 
As  to  his  nature,  no  one  will  dispute  that  he  was  thor- 
oughly conscientious.  He  undoubtedly  entered  upon  his 
persecution  of  the  Christians  with  a  good  conscience,  be- 
lieving that  as  enemies  of  his  religion  and  of  God  they 
ought  to  be  exterminated.  But  conscience  has  its  sedi- 
tions and  its  revolutions  from  within,  which  are  most 
radical  and  violent  in  the  deepest  and  strongest  natures. 
It  is  at  least  among  the  probabilities  of  the  case,  one  may 
even  say  that  it  is  an  antecedent  condition,  without  which 
his  conversion,  like  that  of  any  other  man,  is  inexplicable, 
that  Paul  was  tormented  with  conscientious  scruples,  and 
that  they  concerned  his  cruel  persecution  of  the  inoffen- 
sive Christians.  The  probability  is  raised  to  a  certainty, 
when  we  consider  that  many  years  after  he  had  not  over- 
come these  scruples,  as  is  apparent  from  the  humble  con- 
fession :  "For  I  am  the  least  of  the  apostles,  that  am  not 
meet  to  be  called  an  apostle,  because  I  persecuted  the 
church  of  God"  (i  Cor.  xv.  9).  That  he  saw  and  felt 
more  keenly  the  wrong  after  his  conversion  than  before 
may  be  conceded.  But  that  he  was  conscious  of  it  before 
that  event,  and  that  his  scruples  were  among  the  causes 
that  determined  it,  is  in  accord  with  human  nature  and 
with  all  we  know  about  conversion. 

That  intellectual  doubts  accompanied  the  conscientious 
scruples  is  in  the  highest  degree  probable.  The  chasm 
that  separated  a  persecuting  Jewish  zealot  from  a  Chris- 
tian apostle  to  the  gentiles,  is  too  wide  to  be  bridged  with- 


THE    CONVERSION  63 

out  an  intellectual  process.  A  conversion  like  that  in 
question  could  be  nothing  short  of  a  transformation  of  the 
entire  inward  man,  mind,  heart,  and  soul.  A  man  like 
Paul  can  hardly  be  conceived  to  have  become  the  enthusi- 
astic preacher  of  the  gospel  of  the  uncircumcision  without 
first  giving  himself  a  rational  account  of  the  matter. 
Much  less,  without  being  grounded  in  this  conviction 
would  he  so  persistently  have  adhered  to  it  throughout 
his  life.  Nothing  is  more  evident  from  his  writings  than 
that  he  regarded  his  peculiar  apprehension  of  the  gospel 
as  a  thesis  which  must  be  defended  by  argument  and 
supported  by  reason.  Shall  we  say,  then,  that  he  accepted 
the  apostleship  to  the  gentiles  against  a  prejudice  which 
even  the  original  apostles  of  Jesus  could  not  overcome, 
and  first  thought  of  the  reasons  for  it  afterwards  .''  Such 
a  construction  of  the  matter  were  most  unpauline.  It  is 
true  that  he  does  not  tell  us  that  he  had  reasoned  on  the 
matter  prior  to  his  conversion,  and  we  have  only  an  inci- 
dental hint  as  to  his  scruples  of  conscience.  But  "  the 
light  of  the  knowledge  of  the  glory  of  God  "  which  shone 
in  his  heart  may  well  have  been  the  white  light  of  reason 
to  a  man  so  zealous  as  he  was  to  ''prove  all  things." 
That  a  man  so  enthusiastic  as  Paul  was  for  righteousness 
and  so  intent  upon  reasoning  should  have  accepted  an 
entirely  new  theory  of  it  without  reasoning  upon  its 
grounds  is  not  likely,  when  we  consider  how  persistently 
and  thoroughly  he  argues  for  it  in  the  Epistle  to  the 
Romans.  We  have  seen  that  as  a  Pharisee  he  believed 
in  the  Messianic  kingdom,  the  condition  of  which  was  the 
righteousness  of  the  people. 

To  a  logical  mind  like  Paul's  the  alternative  was  pre- 
sented of  either  abandoning  this  great  Messianic  hope  or 
of  finding  a  new  way  of  righteousness,  —  another  way  than 
the  impossible  righteousness  of  the  law,  which,  even  if  he 


64  THE  MAN 

felt  that  he,  the  "blameless,"  had  attained  it,  was  far  from 
being  attained  by  the  mass  of  his  people.  That  in  his 
acceptance  of  Christ  was  implied  his  belief  in  the  new 
righteousness  by  grace,  can  hardly  be  doubted.  For  the 
question  is  legitimate  here,  why  did  he  accept  Christ  at 
all  ?  One  will  scarcely  dare  to  affirm  that  he  accepted 
him  without  any  reason  whatever.  Was  it  because  of  a 
''revelation  "  }  If  so,  the  revelation  must  have  had  a  con- 
tent ;  and  if  that  content  was  in  part  the  theological  doc- 
trine of  righteousness  by  faith  without  the  works  of  the 
law,  we  have  a  choice  between  two  interpretations  of  the 
matter  —  either  this  doctrine  was  supernaturally  made 
known  to  him  without  his  own  reflection,  or  it  was  a  dis- 
covery of  his  reason,  which  he  called  a  "revelation." 
The  way  in  which  in  his  Epistles  he  seeks  to  buttress  the 
doctrine  on  every  side  with  argument,  favours  the  latter 
alternative,  and  indicates  that  he  did  not  think  it  could 
stand  by  authority.  Two  words  in  the  passage  in 
Gal.  i.  i6  reveal  the  apostle's  consciousness  at  the  time 
of  his  call  to  the  gentile  ministry  and  the  grounds  of  his 
acceptance  of  the  Christian  faith.  He  says  it  pleased  God 
to  reveal  His  Son  in  him.  He  does  not  say,  to  reveal 
Jesus,  and  the  thought  undoubtedly  is  that  his  Christian 
belief  rested  upon  his  conviction  that  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
was  the  Son  of  God,  the  true  Messiah.  Without  this 
belief  Paul  could  never  have  become  a  Christian.  He  did 
not  believe  in  Jesus  because  of  his  teachings,  with  which 
he  shows  little  acquaintance,  and  so  long  as  he  thought 
him  to  have  been  a  pretending  Messiah  ignominiously  put 
to  death,  he  persecuted  his  followers.  The  first  verse  of 
Galatians  throws  still  more  light  upon  the  process  of  the 
change  which  took  place  in  his  thought.  It  cannot  escape 
the  observing  reader  that  he  is  here  intent  upon  stating 
the  grounds  of  his  apostleship  to  the  utmost.     Hence  he 


THE    CONVERSION  65 

does  not  stop  with  saying  that  he  is  an  apostle,  "not  of 
men,  but  by  Jesus  Christ  and  God  the  Father,"  but  he 
adds,  ''wJio  raised  him  from  the  dead.''  Every  one  who 
has  a  sHght  knowledge  of  the  apostle's  doctrine  knows 
that  the  resurrection  of  Jesus  was  one  of  its  fundamental 
principles.  By  this  Jesus  was  "  declared  to  be  the  Son  of 
God  with  power"  (Rom.  i.  4).  Had  Saul  of  Tarsus  not 
been  convinced  of  this,  there  would  have  been  no  apostle- 
ship  to  the  gentiles. 

Here,  then,  we  have  the  key  to  the  solution  of  the 
problem  of  the  great  apostleship.  The  exaltation  of  Jesus 
by  divine  power  from  the  realm  of  death  to  heaven  in  a 
''  body  of  glory  "  was  to  Paul  indisputable  proof  that  God 
recognised  him  as  His  Son.  From  this  principle  the  step 
was  easy  by  a  process  of  reasoning  from  premises  of  the 
Jewish  theology  to  the  conclusion  that  his  death  was  an 
atonement  for  the  sins  of  men,  and  on  this  doctrine  is 
founded  that  of  the  new  righteousness  by  faith,  the  aboli- 
tion of  the  law,  the  overthrow  of  sin  and  death,  and  by  a 
marvellous  stroke  of  religious  genius  the  mystic  union  of 
the  believer  with  Christ  in  the  fellowship  of  the  Spirit, 
the  blessedness,  the  sonship,  the  victory.  The  Pharisaic 
doctrine  of  the  last  things  furnished  the  idea  of  the  great 
consummation,  the  coming  of  the  glorified  Messiah  in  his 
kingdom  ''  with  all  his  saints,"  the  resurrection  of  the 
believers,  Christ  being  the  ''first  fruits,"  the  "peace  and 
joy"  of  the  kingdom  in  which  God  should  be  "all  in  all." 
How,  then,  did  Paul  come  to  believe  in  the  resurrection 
of  Jesus.?  That  he  had  heard  of  it  cannot  be  doubted. 
That  he  did  not  believe  it  while  he  was  persecuting  the 
Christians  is  certain,  for  otherwise  he  would  have  been 
one  of  them.  As  a  Pharisee,  the  doctrine  of  the  resurrec- 
tion "at  the  last  day"  was  not  new  to  him.  But  why 
should   he   have  believed   in  this   miracle   of   the    special 


66  THE  MAN 

resurrection  of  Jesus  ?  What  he  had  witnessed  at  the 
martyrdom  of  Stephen,  and  perhaps  of  other  Christians, 
may  have  made  a  strong  impression  upon  him,  and  given 
him  the  idea  of  the  glorified  Jesus  "sitting  at  the  right 
hand  of  God"  (Acts  vii.  55).  The  transformation  may 
have  been  completed  by  a  vision  of  Christ  (i  Cor.  xv. 
8),  which,  in  the  conditions  to  which  he  was  subject,  would 
be  regarded  by  him  as  representing  an  objective  reality 
according  to  2  Cor.  xii.  1-4.* 

*  According  to  the  generally  accepted  chronology  of  Paul's  life  and  work, 
his  conversion  was  in  the  year  34  or  35  of  our  era.  This  chronology  is  based 
upon  the  dating  of  the  appointment  of  Festus  as  procurator  in  the  year  60  or 
61.  Harnack  dates  Festus'  appointment  in  the  year  56  and  the  conversion 
accordingly  in  the  year  30.  A  detailed  discussion  of  this  matter  is  remote  from 
the  purpose  of  this  work,  and  it  is  sufficient  to  remark  that  Harnack's  data  are 
not  of  a  character  to  place  his  conclusion  beyond  question.  For  a  discussion 
of  Harnack's  construction  the  reader  is  referred  to  an  article  by  Professor  F. 
W.  Christie  in  The  New  World  for  September,  1897.  See  also  Heuduck, 
Die  Chronol.  der  netitest.  Schriften,  in  Eva7i.  Kirchetizeiinng.  1897,  ^o-  3  ^-i 
and  Schiirer,  Ztir  Chronol.  des  Lebens  Fauli,  in  Zeitschr.  fiir  xvissenschaftl. 
Theol.      1897,  i.  pp.  21-42. 


PART    II 

THE  MISSIONARY 


CHAPTER   IV 

THE   FIRST    YEARS  — GALATIA  AND    THE   GALATIAN   EPISTLE 

THE  man  Paul  could  not  but  become  Paul  the  apostle. 
He  could  not,  however,  be  simply  an  apostle,  a 
Jewish-Christian  apostle,  but  must  of  necessity  become 
the  apostle  to  the  gentiles.  To  be  this  lay  in  his  nature, 
which  permitted  him  to  do  nothing  by  halves.  The  call 
of  God,  who  revealed  His  Son  in  him,  that  he  "  might 
preach  him  among  the  heathen"  (Gal.  i.  15),  was  the 
objective  apprehension  and'  expression  of  a  subjective 
necessity, —  a  necessity  of  his  nature,  a  requirement  of 
his  reason  and  conscience.  His  Epistles  show,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  method  of  his  thinking  to  have  been  the  treat- 
ment of  a  subject  from  the  point  of  view  of  its  funda- 
mental principle,  which  he  followed  out  to  its  logical 
consequences.  The  death  of  Christ  as  an  atonement  for 
sin  was  the  central  thought  of  his  Christian  belief,  and 
we  have  seen  that  without  this  apprehension  of  it,  that  is, 
if  he  had  regarded  it  as  only  a  martyrdom  for  a  principle, 
he  could  never  have  become  a  Christian.  To  him  the 
cross  must  symbolise  "the  end  of  the  law"  and  the  over- 
throw of  the  Jewish  dispensation  with  its  bondage  and  its 
whole  system  of  righteousness  by  works.  Accordingly, 
a  Christianity  which  was  only  another  form  of  Judaism 
was  impossible  to  him.  This  is  clear  from  his  declaration 
that  **  if  righteousness  come  by  the  law,  then  Christ  is 
dead  in  vain  "  (Gal.  ii.  21).  The  logical  conclusion  from 
these  premises  to  such  a  mind  as  Paul's  was  that  the  law 

69 


70  THE   MISSIONARY 

being  abolished,  Jews  and  gentiles,  those  ''  under  the  law  " 
and  those  "  not  under  the  law,"  were  on  an  equality  in 
the  Christian  dispensation.  Christ  was  "  the  end  of  the 
law  "  not  to  Jews  only,  but  to  all  who  should  believe.  '*  If 
ye  be  Christ's,"  he  writes  to  a  gentile  church,  ''  then  are 
ye  Abraham's  seed,  and  heirs  according  to  the  promise  " 
(Gal.  iii.  29).  This  is  the  logical  side  of  the  apostleship  to 
the  gentiles.     It  has  also  its  emotional  side. 

That  Paul  had  an  irresistible  natural  impulse  to  defend 
and  propagate  his  convictions  is  evident  from  his  own  con- 
fessions. The  man  who  before  his  conversion  to  Christian- 
ity was  a  Jewish  zealot  and  persecutor  could  not  become 
a  merely  passive  believer  in  the  new  religion.  He  felt  that 
he  was  born  to  be  an  apostle,  a  missionary,  an  evangelist. 
He  designates  himself  as  one  ''  called  to  be  an  apostle  of 
Jesus  Christ  by  the  will  of  God  "  (i  Cor.  i.  i).  "  Necessity 
is  laid  upon  me,"  he  says,  "yea,  woe  is  me  if  I  preach  not 
the  gospel"  (i  Cor.  ix.  16).  The  matter  demanded  haste, 
and  he  set  himself  to  the  task  with  eager  interest  and 
unquenchable  zeal.  ''The  time  is  short"  to  him,  for  the 
Lord  Christ  would  soon  come  to  establish  his  kingdom, 
and  he  was  zealous  to  "present"  to  him  on  that  great 
day  a  multitude  of  believers  as  his  "crown,"  his  ''joy" 
(i  Thess.  ii.  19).  His  was  not  a  nature  capable  of  enjoying 
alone  the  blessedness  of  the  new  faith  and  its  promises. 
Christ  died  for  all,  and  the  apostle's  hope  was  that  the 
Master's  kingdom  when  he  came  might  be  universal. 
With  the  love  of  Christ  for  all  men  he  grieved  especially 
over  his  "  brethren  according  to  the  flesh "  because  of 
their  blindness,  and  we  have  a  revelation  of  the  great 
missionary's  heart  in  the  words:  "Brethren,  my  heart's 
desire  and  prayer  to  God  for  Israel  is  that  they  might  be 
saved  "  (Rom.  x.  i). 

With  all  his  zeal  for  the  gentile  mission  the  salvation 


THE   FIRST    YEARS  /I 

of  the  Jews  lay  near  the  apostle's  heart.  He  could  not 
forget  that  for  them  the  Messiah's  kmgdom  was  primarily 
intended,  and  that  the  Messiah  was  "  of  the  seed  of  David 
according  to  the  flesh."  His  eager  desire  for  the  evan- 
gelisation of  ''Jew  and  Greek"  alike  is  expressed  in  the 
words :  "  For  whosoever  shall  call  on  the  name  of  the 
Lord  shall  be  saved.  How  then  shall  they  call  on  him 
in  whom  they  have  not  believed }  and  how  shall  they 
believe  in  him  of  whom  they  have  not  heard  .?  and  how 
shall  they  hear  without  a  preacher }  and  how  shall  they 
preach  except  they  be  sent.?"  (Rom.  x.  13-15).  His 
dream  of  the  kingdom  of  Christ  so  ardently  expected  and 
longed  for  was  that  it  should  not  only  contain  *'  the  fulness 
of  the  gentiles,"  but  that  in  it  also  ''all  Israel"  would  be 
"saved"  (Rom.  xi.  25,  26).  Attention  has  already  been 
called  to  the  fact  that  it  was  far  from  the  apostle's  thought 
to  be  the  founder  of  a  system  of  theology.  The  ruling 
impulse  of  his  life  was  to  carry  the  gospel  of  Jesus,  his 
gospel,  the  Pauline  good  news  of  universal  grace,  far  and 
wide,  up  and  down  in  the  earth.  "  I  have  planted,"  he 
says,  and  to  put  the  seed  of  Christian  truth  in  new  soil 
was  the  mission  to  which  he  was  "called."  "According 
to  the  grace  of  God  which  is  given  unto  me,"  he  writes  to 
the  Corinthians,  "  as  a  wise  master-builder  I  have  laid  the 
foundation,  and  another  buildeth  thereon"  (i  Cor.  iii.  10). 
He  conceived  Christ  to  have  wrought  by  him  wondrous 
things  "to  make  the  gentiles  obedient  by  word  and  deed." 
With  the  true  spirit  of  the  pioneer  he  sought  out  new 
fields,  and  strove  "  to  preach  the  gospel,  not  where  Christ 
was  named,"  lest  he  should  "build  on  another  man's 
foundation"  (Rom.  xv.  18,  20),  but  where  the  good  tidings 
had  not  been  proclaimed. 

To  a  man  of  such  impulses  and  ambitions  the  appro- 
priate gifts  could  not  have  been  wanting.     For  what  is  a 


^2  THE   MISSIONARY 

''call"  but  the  inward  cry  of  capacities  and  powers  for  an 
opportunity  to  fulfil  their  destiny  ?  We  have  no  means 
of  forming  an  adequate  conception  of  the  apostle  as  a 
preacher.  The  discourses  attributed  to  him  in  Acts  cannot 
be  exact  reproductions,  but  must  be  compositions  based 
upon  what  he  was  reputed  to  have  said,  and  embellished 
according  to  the  fancy  of  the  writer.  But  we  may  con- 
clude from  many  passages  in  his  Epistles  that,  notwith- 
standing the  charge  of  his  enemies  that  *'  his  bodily 
presence  was  weak,  and  his  speech  contemptible  "  (2  Cor. 
X.  10),  he  was  a  speaker  of  no  little  fire,  passion,  and  per- 
suasion. In  Rom.  vii.  and  viii.  are  manifested  graphic 
power  and  moving  pathos,  and  in  i  Cor  xiii.  he  attains  to 
lyric  beauty  and  classic  completeness.  It  is  the  inward  man, 
the  conviction,  the  earnestness,  the  pent-up  fire,  that  moves, 
and  is  mighty  *'to  the  pulling  down  of  strongholds";  and 
if  a  man  have  these  qualities  he  may  be  a  power  even 
with  a  fragile  body  and  an  unprepossessing  exterior. 
Whatever  advantage  in  convincing,  moving,  and  control- 
ling men  belongs  to  him  who  has  the  courage  of  his  con- 
victions was  certainly  on  the  side  of  the  apostle  as  a 
missionary.  The  boldness  with  which  he  preached  his 
gospel  of  liberty  and  his  fearless  defence  of  it  against  the 
judaisers  could  not  but  captivate  and  hold  to  his  cause  a 
class  of  minds  whose  support  was  essential  to  its  success. 
To  this  was  joined  the  intensity  that  sprang  from  the 
concentration  of  his  thought  upon  one  theme  which  he 
made  central  in  his  ministry  —  that  of  the  cross.  ''For  I 
was  determined,"  he  writes  to  the  Corinthians,  ''to  know 
nothing  among  you  save  Jesus  Christ  and  him  crucified  " 
(i  Cor.  ii.  3). 

There  was  one  preeminent  qualification,  moreover,  to 
which,  however  we  may  seek  to  explain  it  psychologically, 
the   apostle's  power  as  a  preacher  was  largely  due.     He 


THE  FIRST    YEARS  73 

believed  that  his  word  was  not  his  own,  but  that  he  spoke 
by  the  authority  of  the  Spirit.  A  superhuman  power, 
now  conceived  as  the  Spirit  of  God,  now  as  Christ,  was  to 
him  not  only  the  source  of  his  "gospel,"  but  also  a  con- 
stant inspiration.  ''  I  can  do  all  things,"  he  declares, 
''through  him  who  strengtheneth  me"  (Phil.  iv.  13).  To 
the  Corinthians  he  writes  :  *'  And  my  speech  and  my 
preaching  were  not  with  enticing  words  of  man's  wisdom, 
but  in  demonstration  of  the  Spirit  and  of  power"  (i  Cor. 
ii.  4).  Again  in  the  same  chapter  (vv.  12,  13)  he  says  :  *' Now 
we  have  received  not  the  spirit  of  the  world,  but  the  Spirit 
which  is  of  God,  that  we  might  know  the  things  that  are 
freely  given  us  of  God ;  which  things  we  also  speak,  not  in 
the  words  which  man's  wisdom  teacheth,  but  which  the 
Holy  Ghost  teacheth,  comparing  spiritual  things  with 
spiritual."  The  power  which  a  man  with  such  a  con- 
sciousness of  communion  with  the  unseen  world,  whose 
gaze  was  fixed  upon  the  things  that  are  invisible  and 
eternal,  could  wield  over  the  simple-minded  who  were  pre- 
disposed to  a  belief  in  the  supernatural,  is  not  easily 
conceived  by  us  at  this  distance  and  in  this  age. 

This  inner  light,  this  ''revelation,"  this  "witness"  of 
the  Spirit  with  his  spirit  (Rom.  viii.  16),  was  the  source  of 
the  apostle's  religious  life  and  experience.  Here  was  the 
basis  of  his  religious  belief,  his  "  seat  of  authority,"  on 
which  he  placed  the  utmost  reliance,  not  indeed  without 
dogma,  but  through  and  beyond  all  dogma.  His  theism, 
his  doctrine  of  Christ,  of  the  atonement,  and  of  the  resur- 
rection, were  all  lifeless  to  him  without  this  direct 
illumination  of  his  consciousness  from  above,  without  the 
divine  witness  that  he  was  a  son  of  God,  and  without  the 
mystic  fellowship  with  Christ  in  which  he  became  one 
with  him.  This  independence  of  external  authority,  of 
tradition,   and  of  human    counsel    and    experience,   which 


74  THE  MISSIONARY 

would  have  been  hazardous  to  a  man  without  Paul's 
religious  genius  and  sobriety  of  judgment,  was  to  him 
indispensable,  and  wanting  it  he  could  not  have  under- 
taken his  mission.  For  his  "  gospel  "  was  not  that  of  the 
original  apostles.  He  must,  then,  have  a  new  one,  or  he 
had  none.  Whence  was  he  to  derive  it  '^.  Not  from  the 
tradition  of  the  teaching  of  Christ  of  which  he  knew 
but  little.  He  had  no  recourse  but  to  his  own  conscious- 
ness illuminated  by  the  Spirit  and  glowing  with  the 
spiritual  baptism  of  immediate  fellowship  with  Jesus. 
We  find  no  evidence  of  any  speculation  of  his  on  the 
psychology  or  philosophy  of  this  experience.  "  The  light 
of  the  knowledge  of  the  glory  of  God  "  which  had  dawned 
in  his  mind  he  ascribed  to  the  immediate  operation  of  the 
Spirit,  or  to  the  indwelling  Christ.  The  speculative  and 
dialectic  interest,  which  was  so  strong  in  him  where  ques- 
tions of  doctrine  were  concerned,  did  not  lead  him  upon 
this  holy  ground.  We  may  well  hesitate  to  venture  upon 
it  and  to  attempt  an  analysis  and  definition  of  that 
which  to  him  was  unanalysable  and  indefinable.  Let  it 
suffice  us  here  to  note  that  this  consciousness  of  divine 
quickening  and  guidance  made  him  very  bold,  and  pro- 
duced an  astonishing  self-reliance. 

When  the  light  of  his  new  gospel  dawned  upon  Paul  — 
an  event  which,  he  implies,  occurred  at  Damascus  — 
instead  of  seeking  for  information  and  instruction  as  to 
the  personality,  life,  and  teachings  of  Jesus  from  those 
who  had  had  intercourse  with  him,  he  boasts  that  he 
"conferred  not  with  flesh  and  blood,"  but  "went  into 
Arabia,  and  returned  again  to  Damascus."  He  does  not 
specifically  mention  a  reason  for  this  action,  but  the 
natural  inference  from  his  words  (Gal.  i.  i6,  17)  is  that  he 
did  not  feel  the  need  of  such  a  conference.  The  evident 
intention,  the  motive,  of  the  passage  is  a  distinct  declara- 


THE   FIRST    YEARS  75 

tion  of  his  independence  of  human  teachers  and  of  the 
knowledge  of  Christ  which  the  apostles  might  have  given 
him.  Weizsacker's  remark  that  *'  the  most  probable  ex- 
planation [of  this  procedure]  is  that  the  external  relations, 
dangers,  which  immediately  threatened  him  on  account  of 
the  step  he  had  taken,  made  it  necessary,"  is  not  based 
upon  any  legitimate  inference  from  the  apostle's  own 
declaration.  It  was  not  until  three  years  later  that  he 
went  up  to  Jerusalem,  and  during  this  period,  passed  be- 
tween Arabia  and  Damascus  (for  that  he  was  in  Arabia 
all  this  time  is  an  unwarrantable  assumption),  he  must 
have  matured  his  purpose,  and  formed  his  plans  for  his 
life  work.  Why  he  three  years  later  decided  to  go  to  Je- 
rusalem he  does  not  inform  us ;  but  we  shall  not  err  in 
assuming  that  it  was  not  to  seek  instruction  in  the  gospel 
from  the  original  apostles  or  from  any  one  of  them.  This 
would  be  contrary  to  the  manifest  intention  of  his  words. 
The  same  reason  that  restrained  him  from  seeking  an 
interview  with  them  immediately  after  his  conversion 
must,  on  the  assumption  of  his  honesty,  be  operative  at  a 
later  period.  If  his  **  revelation  "  was  sufficient,  he  could 
not  at  any  time  be  false  to  it. 

What  the  motive  of  this  visit  to  Jerusalem  was,  is  in  the 
absence  of  any  intimation  regarding  it  by  the  apostle  him- 
self purely  a  matter  of  conjecture.  We  may  positively 
say  that  he  did  not  think  that  in  taking  this  step  he  was 
prejudicing  his  position  as  "  an  apostle  not  of  men,  neither 
by  man,  but  by  Jesus  Christ  and  God  the  Father."  His 
refraining  for  three  years  from  seeking  counsel  of  man 
was  sufficient  to  show  his  independence  and  his  consist- 
ency with  his  claim  of  an  adequate  revelation  from  above. 
His  mention  of  the  limitation  which  he  imposed  upon  him- 
self in  Jerusalem  as  to  intercourse  with  the  apostles  can 
hardly  have  been  made  without  a  purpose.     He  says  he  saw 


76  THE   MISSIONARY 

Peter,  and  abode  with  him  fifteen  days,  but  that  he  saw 
no  other  of  the  apostles,  but  only  James,  the  brother  of 
Jesus.  Was  his  motive  in  going  to  Jerusalem  perhaps  to 
ascertain  the  attitude  of  these  two  prominent  leaders  of 
the  church  in  that  city  toward  his  mission  to  the  gentiles  ? 
If  he  came  to  any  understanding  with  them  at  this  time  on 
this  subject,  we  may  conclude  from  subsequent  events  that 
it  was  not  a  radical  and  thorough  one.  That  their  opposi- 
tion to  him  was  not  violent  is  probable  from  the  fact  that 
he  does  not  intimate  that  there  was  any,  but  says  that 
afterwards  when  he  carried  on  his  mission  in  "  the  regions 
of  Syria  and  Cilicia,"  and  ''the  churches  of  Judea"  heard 
that  their  former  persecutor  was  a  preacher  of  "  the  faith 
which  he  once  destroyed,"  *' they  glorified  God  "  in  him 
(Gal.  i.  22,  23),  although  "the  pillar-apostles"  in  Jerusa- 
lem are  not  necessarily  included  in  this  statement.  The 
mission  to  Jerusalem  appears  to  have  been  a  private 
and  confidential  one  in  any  case,  and  the  inference  is 
legitimate,  that  Paul  wished  to  avoid  the  irritation  to  which 
a  public  discussion  of  the  grounds  of  his  new  gospel  might 
have  given  rise,  and  that  his  procedure  indicates  "  how 
much  there  yet  was  to  be  overcome,  how  much  yet  lay 
between  Paul  and  the  believing  Jews  in  Jerusalem."  The 
presumption  is  a  very  natural  one  that  he  here  learned 
something  of  the  events  of  the  life  of  Jesus  and  of  his 
teaching,  although  neither  the  former  nor  the  latter  occu- 
pies a  very  prominent  place  in  the  writings  that  he  has 
left.  For  a  discussion  of  the  account  of  the  first  years  of 
Paul's  work  given  in  Acts,  the  writer  of  which  omits  all 
mention  of  the  journey  into  Arabia  and  the  three-years' 
interval,  and  brings  him  directly  from  Damascus  to  Jerusa- 
lem, the  reader  is  referred  to  Chapter  VII.,  in  which  the 
relation  of  that  book  to  the  Epistles  is  considered.  In 
regard  to  the  matter  in  question,  it  will  sufifice  to  quote 


THE  FIRST    YEARS  77 

here  Weizsacker's  remark,  that  "the  narrative  of  Acts  is 
as  clearly  and  completely  excluded  by  Paul  himself  as  it 
possibly  could  be." 

In  one  point  the  account  in  Acts  agrees  substantially, 
however,  with  a  statement  made  by  the  apostle  himself, 
that  regarding  his  narrow  escape  from  death  at  Damas- 
cus :  "In  Damascus,"  he  says,  "the  governor  under 
Aretas  the  king  kept  the  city  of  the  Damascenes  with  a 
garrison,  desirous  to  apprehend  me ;  and  through  a  win- 
dow in  a  basket  I  was  let  down  by  the  wall,  and  escaped 
his  hands  "(2  Cor.  xi.  32  f.).  The  account  in  Acts  omits 
mention  of  Aretas  and  the  governor  and  the  garrison,  and 
ascribes  the  persecution  to  "the  Jews"  (Acts  ix.  23-25). 
This  happened,  according  to  this  narrative,  "  some  days  " 
after  the  conversion,  and  since  the  journey  to  Arabia  is 
here  omitted,  we  cannot  learn  from  it  whether  it  was  be- 
fore or  after  it ;  and  since,  moreover,  in  the  passage  in 
2  Corinthians  the  incident  is  simply  mentioned  without  ref- 
erence to  its  connection  with  other  events,  it  is  impossible 
to  assign  it  a  definite  place  in  the  apostle's  career.  Paul 
says  in  Galatians  that  after  going  to  Arabia  he  returned 
to  Damascus.  It  is  hardly  probable,  accordingly,  that  the 
persecution  and  escape  occurred  prior  to  the  departure  for 
Arabia,  since  he  would  not  be  likely  to  come  back  to 
Damascus  where  he  would  be  exposed  to  so  great  a  dan- 
ger. The  peril  and  escape  are  more  probably  assigned  to 
the  period  subsequent  to  his  return  from  Arabia,  and  there 
seems  to  be  no  good  reason  for  the  conjecture  that  they 
find  their  place  during  a  third  visit  to  Damascus  after  the 
fifteen  days  spent  with  Peter  in  Jerusalem ;  a  visit  of 
which  the  apostle  makes  no  mention,  and  for  which  he  can 
hardly  be  said  to  leave  room,  when  he  says,  "  afterwards 
I  came  into  the  regions  of  Syria  and  Cilicia"  (Gal.  i.  21). 

Of  this  period  of  the  apostle's  work,  occupying  fourteen 


78  THE  MISSIONARY 

years,  we  have  unhappily  no  details.  He  simply  says  that 
he  was  employed  in  these  regions,  and  "  was  unknown  by 
face  to  the  churches  of  Judea,"  which  "  glorified  God  "  in 
him  when  they  heard  that  he,  the  former  persecutor,  was 
"  preaching  the  faith  that  he  once  destroyed  "  (Gal.  i.  22- 
24).  The  natural  inference  from  this  is  that  he  was  un- 
disturbed in  his  work  in  Syria  and  Cilicia  by  interference 
from  Jerusalem.  That  he  was  here  occupied  with  the 
gentile  mission  is  probable,  one  may  almost  say  certain, 
from  what  we  know  of  him  and  from  the  predominant  pur- 
pose of  his  life  according  to  his  interpretation  of  the 
"call"  of  God  "by  his  grace"  (Gal.  i.  15).  Hausrath's 
contention  that  during  this  period  he  was  a  preacher  of 
the  circumcision,  a  Jewish-Christian  apostle,  carrying  on  a 
mission  in  the  synagogues  acceptable  to  the  Jerusalem 
authorities,  is  not  well  supported,  to  say  nothing  of  its 
antecedent  improbability.  There  is  not  the  slightest  inti- 
mation of  such  a  mission  in  the  section  in  Galatians  under 
consideration.  On  the  contrary,  in  immediate  connection 
with  the  mention  of  his  mission  in  Syria  and  Cilicia,  the 
apostle  gives  an  account  of  his  journey  to  Jerusalem  to 
communicate  to  the  leaders  of  the  Jewish-Christian  church 
"the  gospel"  which  he  preached  "among  the  gentiles," 
"  lest  by  any  means,"  he  says,  "  I  should  run  or  had  run 
in  vain  "  (Gal.  ii.  2).  The  natural  reference  of  this  pas- 
sage is  to  the  preceding  fourteen  years.  In  fact  we  can- 
not find  any  other  period  of  his  life  to  which  it  relates, 
for  the  "  had  run  "  implies  a  mission  prior  to  the  confer- 
ence in  question.  The  appeal  to  the  passage  in  Gal.  v.  17  : 
"  And  I,  brethren,  if  I  yet  preach  circumcision,  why  do  I 
yet  suffer  persecution,"  cannot  sustain  the  contention. 

For  there  is  no  reference  here  to  any  particular  period  of 
the  apostle's  ministry.  The  argument  of  the  passage  is 
that  his  preaching  of  uncircumcision  is  an  offence  to  the 


THE  FIRST    YEARS 


79 


Jewish-Christian  opponents  who  were  troubUng  the  Gala- 
tians,  an  "  offence  of  the  cross  "  ;  if  he  continue  to  promul- 
gate circumcision  this  offence  would  disappear  so  far  as 
they  are  concerned,  and  this  offence  being  taken  away, 
their  persecution  of  him  ceases.  The  only  purpose  of  the 
passage  is  to  make  it  apparent  to  the  Galatians  that  he 
is  persecuted  solely  because  he  is  not  a  preacher  of  circum- 
cision, and  it  does  not  by  any  means  follow  from  these 
words  that,  during  fourteen  years  of  his  ministry  or  indeed 
at  any  time  since  he  became  a  Christian  apostle,  he  had 
been  an  advocate  of  a  teaching  directly  opposed  to  that 
"gospel"  to  which  he  had  been  especially  *' called."  The 
hazard  of  hanging  upon  a  single  passage  of  somewhat 
doubtful  interpretation  the  doctrine  that  the  apostle  did 
not  really  begin  the  mission  of  his  life  till  after  fourteen 
years  of  judaising,  is  too  manifest  to  require  farther  argu- 
ment. His  declaration,  moreover,  that  "to  those  under 
the  law "  he  was  "  as  under  the  law "  cannot  fairly  be 
pressed  into  the  support  of  the  position  in  question.  In 
being  "all  things  to  all  men"  the  apostle  never  com- 
promised his  fundamental  doctrine,  otherwise  his  journey 
to  the  conference  in  Jerusalem  and  the  Epistles  to  the 
Galatians  and  Corinthians  are  inexplicable.  The  fact  that 
during  at  least  a  part  of  this  period  of  fourteen  years  he 
was  undisturbed  by  the  church  in  Jerusalem,  and  that  the 
Christians  in  Judea  "glorified  God"  in  him,  indicates 
only  that  the  attention  of  the  apostles  at  the  head  of  the 
Jewish-Christian  organisation  was  not  at  first  directed  to  the 
peculiar  character  of  his  work,  and  that  the  questions  which 
called  him  to  the  conference  were  not  agitated  until  later, 
that  is,  until  toward  the  end  of  this  mission  in  Syria  and 
Ciiicia.  The  "irrepressible  conflict"  was,  however,  inev- 
itable. 

That  Paul  was  true  to  his  gentile  mission  during  this 


80  THE  MISSIONARY 

period  is  apparent  from  the  mention  of  Titus  in  Gal.  ii.  3. 
This  Greek  was  in  all  probability  one  of  the  converts  made 
during  the  mission,  and  Paul  took  him  to  the  conference 
in  Jerusalem  as  an  uncircumcised  Christian  according  to 
his  gospel,  where  he  must  have  been  an  offence  to  the 
judaisers,  who  apparently  brought  a  pressure  upon  the 
apostle  to  have  him  submit  to  the  Jewish  rite.  But  Paul 
writes  in  a  tone  of  triumph  to  the  Galatians  that  Titus  was 
"not  compelled  to  be  circumcised."  This  reference  to  a 
single  instance  may  be  regarded  as  an  indication  of  the 
general  principle  of  his  mission  in  the  regions  in  question, 
and  proves  that  here  as  elsewhere,  in  this  earlier  period  as 
well  as  later,  he  accepted  as  Christians  men  of  gentile  birth 
without  imposing  Jewish  rites  upon  them,  and  thus  pro- 
ceeded in  accordance  with  the  great  principle  of  liberty  in 
Christ,  without  which  there  could  have  been  no  mission  to 
the  heathen.  It  is  significant  of  the  point  of  view  and  pur- 
pose of  Acts  that  Titus  is  not  even  mentioned  in  that  book. 
The  writer  of  it  could  find  no  place  in  his  construction  of 
primitive  Christian  history  and  of  the  relation  of  Paul  to  the 
original  apostles  for  the  bold  procedure  of  taking  an  un- 
circumcised Greek  believer  into  the  stronghold  of  the  cir- 
cumcision. It  appears  that  the  apostle  was  not  alone  in 
his  mission  in  Syria  and  Cilicia.  The  mention  of  Barnabas 
in  Gal.  ii.  i  as  his  companion  on  the  journey  to  attend  the 
conference  in  Jerusalem  implies  the  participation  of  this 
Jewish  Christian  in  his  missionary  work.  He  received  also 
with  Paul  at  the  close  of  the  conference  "the  right  hand  of 
fellowship,  that  we  should  go  unto  the  heathen  "  (Gal.  ii.  9). 
From  the  fact  that  when  afterwards  Peter  came  to  Antioch, 
and  after  hirn  "certain  came  from  James,"  and  induced 
him  to  withdraw  from  the  relations  which  he  had  had  with 
the  gentile  Christians,  "  other  Jews  dissembled  likewise  with 
him"  (Gal.  ii.  12),  it  appears  that  the  church  in  Antioch 


THE   FIRST    YEARS  8 1 

was  not  composed  entirely  of  converts  from  the  heathen, 
but  m  part  of  Jewish  Christians.  This  may  be  regarded  as 
an  indication  of  the  general  results  of  the  mission  in  these 
regions.  To  say  nothing  of  the  apostle's  ardent  interest  in 
the  conversion  of  his  ''brethren  according  to  the  flesh,"  it 
is  not  probable  that  he  should  have  made  no  effort  to  urge 
Jews  to  his  apprehension  of  the  gospel. 

The  understanding  at  the  conference  that  Paul  and  Bar- 
nabas were  to  "  go  to  the  heathen,"  and  the  original  apostles 
"to  the  circumcision,"  should  not  be  so  rigidly  interpreted 
as  to  exclude  the  effort  on  both  sides  to  bring  any  willing 
hearer  into  the  Christian  communion.  The  principle  for 
which  Paul  contended  was  the  freedom  of  his  converts  from 
the  bondage  of  the  law.  The  difficulty  of  organising  purely 
gentile-Christian  churches  composed,  as  they  must  be,  of 
men  who  had  had  no  traditions  connecting  them  with  the 
antecedents  of  Christianity  and  no  knowledge  of  the  Script- 
ures, on  which  the  apostolic  preaching  founded  it,  must 
have  appeared  to  a  man  of  Paul's  insight  insuperable.  The 
Messiahship  of  Jesus  could  have  little  significance  to  men 
who  were  not  familiar  with  the  great  Jewish  hope  in  the 
Deliverer  who  was  to  come  and  with  the  prophetic  writings 
of  the  Old  Testament.  Paul's  doctrine  of  the  atonement 
would  also  be  with  difficulty  appreciated  by  minds  not 
schooled  in  the  Jewish  theology,  although  heathenism  did 
not  wholly  lack  points  of  contact  with  it.  It  must,  then, 
be  regarded  as  the  great  good  fortune  of  the  mission  to 
the  gentiles  that  the  churches  founded  by  it  contained  a 
nucleus  of  converts  from  Judaism.  It  was  also  its  good 
fortune  that  the  man  who  conducted  it  was  a  Hellenist 
in  sympathy  with  the  thought  of  those  whom  he  sought  to 
win,  and  with  a  mind  hospitable  enough  to  receive  and 
appropriate  in  his  teaching  certain  ideas  with  which  they 
were  familiar,  or  in  his  own  words,  able  to   become  "  to 

G 


82  THE   MISSIONARY 

those  without  the  law  as  without  law."  In  the  hands  of 
purely  Jewish  propagandists  the  gentile  mission  would 
have  been  a  failure.  A  Jewish  Christianity  could  not  be- 
come a  world-religion. 

It  is  related  in  Acts  that  the  disciples  were  first  called 
Christians  in  Antioch  (xi.  26)  —  a  statement  which  there  is 
no  good  reason  for  doubting.  In  connection  with  this, 
however,  the  construction  of  the  history  of  this  period 
which  the  author  makes  is  open  to  question  as  to  its  ac- 
curacy. The  manifest  purpose  is  to  make  it  appear  that 
the  missionary  work  in  Syria  was  watched  over  and  directed 
by  the  authorities  in  Jerusalem.  That  the  church  in 
Antioch  was  founded  by  "  men  of  Cyprus  and  Cyrene  "  who 
fled  from  Jerusalem  on  occasion  of  "the  persecution  that 
arose  about  Stephen,"  and  who  there  preached  ''unto  the 
Grecians  the  Lord  Jesus,"  is  not  incredible  or  improbable. 
The  mission  in  Antioch  may  have  been  begun  indepen- 
dently of  Paul,  and  that  it  was  a  gentile  Christian  mission 
is  evidently  implied  in  the  narrative  in  Acts  xi.  20.  But 
the  account  of  the  relations  of  Paul  to  the  Jerusalem 
authorities  given  in  this  section  is  in  the  highest  degree 
improbable  from  his  own  statement  of  the  matter  which  we 
must  regard  as  the  historical  source.  He  represents  that 
the  attitude  of  the  church  in  Jerusalem  toward  his  work  in 
Syria  and  Cilicia  was  such  that  he  was  apprehensive  that 
he  "  should  run  or  had  run  in  vain,"  and  that  the  situation 
required  that  he  should  go  up  there,  and  set  before  the 
apostles  the  character  and  grounds  of  his  mission.  The 
legitimate  inference  from  this  is  that  during  these  four- 
teen years  he  had  been  the  real  representative  of  the 
gospel  to  the  gentiles  in  those  regions,  and  that  this  was 
his  mission,  and  not  one  carried  on  chiefly  by  Barnabas 
and  others  to  which  the  Jerusalem  church  stood  as  a  foster 
mother. 


THE  FIRST    YEARS  83 

But  the  writer  of  Acts,  after  relating  that  Paul's  visit  to 
Jerusalem,  instead  of  being  a  private  one  to  Peter,  was  a 
public  one  in  which  he  was  with  the  apostles,  ''coming  in 
and  going  out  at  Jerusalem,"  and  '*  speaking  boldly  in  the 
name  of  the  Lord  and  disputing  with  the  Grecians  "  (Acts 
ix.  27-29),  says  that  instead  of  his  acting  independently 
*'the  brethren  brought  him  down  to  Csesarea,  and  sent 
him  forth  to  Tarsus."  Here  he  is  left  until  Barnabas,  the 
representative  of  the  apostles,  goes  and  brings  him  to 
Antioch  (Acts  xi.  25,  26).  In  all  this  the  motive  to  assign 
him  a  subordinate  part  is  manifest,  as  is  the  attempt  to 
make  it  appear  that  the  gentile  mission  in  Syria  was 
watched  over  by  the  mother-church,  and  that  such  cor- 
dial relations  existed  between  the  two  that  relief  was  sent 
by  the  adherents  of  the  former  to  the  latter  during  a 
famine  which  a  "prophet"  from  Jerusalem  had  foretold 
would  extend  ''throughout  all  the  world."  To  complete 
the  series  of  improbabilities,  Paul  is  made  one  of  the  mes- 
sengers to  carry  this  contribution  to  Jerusalem,  although 
he  says  that  until  he  went  up  there  to  the  conference  he 
was  personally  unknown  "to  the  churches  of  Judea " 
(Acts  xi.  30;  Gal.  i.  22);  and  plainly  indicates  that  he  did 
not  make  the  journey  after  his  first  visit  until  he  went  for 
that  purpose.* 

Paul  went  to  Jerusalem,  then,  to  defend  his  mission  as 
the  self-conscious  representative  of  a  cause  and  a  work 
which  he  thought  to  be  in  jeopardy  from  that  source.  He 
returned  to  his  labours  with  a  consciousness  of  victory. 
The  apostles  had  accorded  him  "  the  right  hand  of  fellow- 
ship," because  they  were  convinced  that  "  He  who  wrought 
effectually  in  Peter  to  the  apostleship  of  the  circumcision 
was  mighty  in  him  toward  the  gentiles  "  (Gal.  ii.  8).  We 
must  not,  however,  draw  too  sweeping  a  conclusion  from 

*  See  Chapter  VII. 


84  THE  MISSIONARY 

this  recognition  that  "  grace  was  given  "  to  Paul  for  his 
work.  We  may  well  believe  rather  that,  as  is  the  case  in 
compromises  generally,  the  whole  question  at  issue  was 
not  ventured  upon.  A  complete  accord  was  in  the  nature 
of  the  case  impossible.  Paul's  "revelation"  had  not  been 
vouchsafed  to  Peter  and  James  and  John.  They  had  not 
learned  from  Jesus  that  his  death  was  "  the  end  of  the  law," 
and  that  ''  if  righteousness  come  by  the  law,  Christ  was 
dead  in  vain."  That  Paul  demanded  of  them  the  full 
recognition  of  his  gospel  is  improbable.  To  make  such  a 
demand  were  to  lose  his  cause.  He  doubtless  asked  for 
what  he  actually  obtained  —  the  recognition  of  his  freedom 
to  preach  his  gospel  to  the  gentiles  as  a  missionary.  He 
does  not  intimate  that  he  secured  a  recognition  of  his 
apostleship,  the  claim  to  which  he  was  afterwards  so 
strenuous  to  maintain,  when  it  was  disputed  by  men  who 
from  the  Jewish-Christian  side  came  into  his  churches  to 
oppose  him  (i  Cor.  ix.  1-5).*  If  it  was  accorded  to  Paul 
that  his  gentile  converts  should  not  be  subjected  to  cir- 
cumcision, the  full  observance  of  the  law  was  doubtless 
reserved  for  the  Jewish-Christian  believers.  A  complete 
accord  between  the  two  parties  to  the  controversy  would 
have  required  a  recognition  of  the  principle  that  the  way 
of  salvation  was  the  same  for  Jewish  and  gentile  converts, 
either  by  the  observance  of  the  law  or  by  its  non-observance 
on  both  sides.  But  subsequent  events  show  that  no  such 
agreement  was  reached.  Paul  certainly  did  not  yield  his 
doctrine  that  salvation  is  without  the  works  of  the  law,  and 
the  apostles  did  not  abandon  their  doctrine  that  the  law 
was  the  way  of  life.  We  cannot  think  of  them  as  admit- 
ting that  righteousness  is  not  ''through  the  law,"  that 
they  who  are  under  the  law  are  under  a  "  curse"  (Gal.  iii. 
10),  and  that  in  a  Christian  experience  it  "is  found  to  be 

*  It  is  significant  that  the  writer  of  Acts  studiously  avoids  this  recognition. 


THE  FIRST    YEARS  85 

unto  death  "  (Rom.  vii.  10).  In  "the  right  hand  of  fel- 
lowship that  he  should  go  unto  the  heathen "  was  not 
implied  the  settlement  of  the  question  as  to  the  relations 
of  Jewish-Christian  and  gentile  converts  in  churches  com- 
posed of  both.  We  have  no  intimation  that  this  important 
matter  was  discussed  at  all. 

If  Paul  understood  the  compact  to  mean  that  both 
classes  should  associate  on  an  equality,  and  eat  at  the  same 
table,  it  is  evident  that  James  did  not  so  construe  it  (Gal. 
ii.  12).  That  a  Jew  should  overcome  the  deep-seated  re- 
pugnance of  his  race  for  the  uncleanness  of  heathenism 
required  his  endowment  with  the  ''grace"  of  Paul,  just  as 
his  recognition  of  the  doctrine  that  Christ  was  "  the  end  of 
the  law"  was  impossible  without  the  great  apostle's 
religious  insight  and  genius.  That  Paul  in  this  matter 
had  ''  the  Spirit  of  Christ  "  no  one  will  now  dispute.  In  his 
doctrine  that  in  Christ  ''there  is  neither  Jew  nor  Greek," 
and  that  the  spiritual  relation  of  man  to  God  is  one  of 
inward  union  of  the  human  with  the  divine  will  in  indepen- 
dence of  outward  forms,  he  rescued  from  Jewish  Chris- 
tianity, and  preserved  for  mankind  our  most  precious 
inheritance  in  Jesus.  That  he  was  glad  to  accede  to  the 
request  to  "remember  the  poor"  among  the  Jewish  Chris- 
tians is  in  accord  with  his  doctrine  that  "  all  are  one  in 
Christ  Jesus "  (Gal.  ii.  10,  iii.  2"^).  However  defective 
the  compact  in  question  was,  on  account  of  insuperable 
prejudices  and  opposing  irreconcilable  points  of  view,  it  is 
of  vast  importance  in  so  far  as  the  recognition  of  the 
Pauline  mission  laid  the  foundations  of  a  Christian  church 
for  the  world. 

The  incompleteness  of  the  Jerusalem  compact  became 
soon  after  apparent  at  Antioch,  where  Peter  joined  with 
other  Jewish  Christians  in  eating  at  the  same  table  with 
the  gentile   converts,  but  withdrew  from  this   fellowship 


86  THE   MISSIONARY 

when  emissaries  "  from  James "  apparently  brought  the 
influence  of  that  leader  to  bear  upon  him  (Gal.  ii.  12). 
The  situation  was  critical  for  both  parties.  The  authori- 
ties in  Jerusalem  could  not  but  see  that  for  Peter  to  make 
such  a  concession  was  practically  the  abandonment  of  the 
principle  for  which  they  contended.  On  the  other  hand, 
Paul's  cause  was  in  peril,  for  the  contagion  of  Peter's  "  dis- 
sembling" extended  to  ''the  other  Jews"  in  the  church  at 
Antioch,  and  "  Barnabas  also  was  carried  away  with  their 
dissimulation"  (Gal.  ii.  13).  The  procedure  of  Paul  in 
the  emergency  reveals  the  leading  traits  of  his  character, 
decision,  the  courage  of  his  convictions,  inflexibility,  inexo- 
rable logic.  Not  to  take  a  decided  position  now  was  to  lose 
his  cause  and  to  be  false  to  his  "gospel."  The  vacillation 
of  Peter  filled  him  with  indignation.  He  had  him  at  a  great 
disadvantage,  and  he  did  not  fail  to  improve  his  oppor- 
tunity. He  charges  him  with  hypocrisy  for  having  fel- 
lowshipped  the  gentile  Christians  apparently  on  principle, 
and  immediately  changed  his  policy,  because  "  he  feared 
them  who  were  of  the  circumcision."  Whether  Peter  in 
previous  interviews  had  substantially  adopted  Paul's  inter- 
pretation of  Christianity  or  no  is  not  important  here. 
Paul's  charge  "  to  his  face  "  before  the  assembled  church 
was  well  founded  on  the  fact  that  he  had  freely  associated 
with  the  gentiles  at  first,  and  had  retreated  through  fear. 
He  had  acted  according  to  the  Pauline  principle  that 
"there  is  nothing  unclean  of  itself"  (Rom.  xiv.  14),  and 
had  then  been  intimidated,  and  driven  into  a  course  of 
conduct  which  was  a  declaration  that  he  regarded  his  gen- 
tile brethren  as  unclean.  He  had  suffered  the  spirit  of 
Christ  which  had  ruled  him  for  a  time  to  be  driven  out  of 
his  breast  by  the  fear  of  man.  From  Paul's  pointed  ques- 
tion, which  exposes  Peter's  inconsistency  :  "  If  thou  being 
a  Jew  livest  after  the  manner  of  the  gentiles  [as  he  had 


THE   FIRST    YEARS  8/ 

done  there  in  Antioch]  and  not  as  do  the  Jews,  why  com- 
pellest  thou  the  gentiles  to  Kve  as  do  the  Jews  ? "  it  may 
be  inferred  that  the  latter  had  endeavoured  to  force  the 
gentile  believers  to  accept  the  Jewish  rites. 

This  of  course  aggravated  Peter's  offence  in  the  eyes 
of  Paul.  Perhaps  he  had  justified  his  withdrawal  by  the 
declaration  that  the  gentiles  were  by  nature  ''sinners," 
unclean,  from  the  Jewish  point  of  view.  In  any  case  Paul 
takes  up  this  thought,  and  says  :  "  We  Jews  by  nature,  and 
not  [as  you  say]  sinners  of  the  gentiles,  knowing  that  a 
man  is  not  justified  by  the  works  of  the  law,  but  by  the 
faith  of  Jesus  Christ,  even  we  have  believed  in  Jesus 
Christ,  that  we  might  be  justified  by  the  faith  of  Christ, 
and  not  by  the  works  of  the  law ;  for  by  the  works  of 
the  law  shall  no  flesh  be  justified  "  (Gal.  ii.  14-16).  The 
inference  from  these  words  is  that  of  the  two,  Paul  alone 
had  acted  consistently  with  the  profession  of  Christian 
faith.  Why  should  one  call  oneself  a  Christian  at  all, 
if  one  is  still  to  attain  righteousness  in  the  old  way  of 
the  law }  But,  the  apostle  continues,  in  seeking  this 
new  righteousness  by  faith,  in  disregarding  the  works  of 
the  law,  and  in  living  like  gentiles  and  with  them  we 
are  not  "  sinners,"  are  not  unclean,  otherwise  Christ  is 
"the  minister  of  sin"  (Gal.  ii.  17).  The  seeking  after 
justification  through  faith  in  Christ,  the  practical  over- 
throw of  the  law,  is  no  sin,  but  "  if  I  build  again  the 
things  which  I  destroyed  [seek  to  restore  the  law  and 
attain  righteousness  by  works]  I  make  myself  a  trans- 
gressor"  (Gal.  ii.  18).  By  restoring  the  law,  which  was 
done  away  in  Christ,  by  seeking  righteousness  as  Peter 
would  have  it  sought,  he  would  put  himself  in  the  way  of 
becoming  a  transgressor,  because  there  is  transgression 
only  where  there  is  law  (Rom.  iv.  15).  But  "through  the 
law,"   he  adds  (by  reason  of  the  fact  that  according  to  the 


88  THE  MISSIONARY 

law  the  penalty  of  sin  is  death),  *'  I  am  dead  to  the  law  .  .  . 
I  am  crucified  with  Christ"  (Gal.  ii.  19;  see  Rom.  vii.  4). 
To  do  otherwise  is  to  ''frustrate  the  grace  of  God." 

It  would  be  unjust  to  charge  James,  and  Peter  in  follow- 
ing him  perhaps  through  fear  of  excommunication,  with  a 
violation  of  the  agreement  made  with  Paul  in  Jerusalem. 
For,  as  has  already  been  pointed  out,  that  agreement  did 
not  contemplate  and  provide  for  a  situation  like  that  in 
Antioch,  where  the  relations  of  Jewish  and  gentile  Chris- 
tians in  a  mixed  church  were  concerned.  The  rupture 
in  Antioch  showed  the  hollowness  of  the  compromise, 
showed  that  in  fact  there  could  be  no  adjustment  of  dif- 
ferences so  radical.  The  gentile  church  was  not  born  of 
the  compact  in  Jerusalem,  which  was  adapted  only  to  men 
who  do  things  by  halves,  but  of  the  conflict  in  Antioch, 
out  of  which  the  great  apostle  who  never  did  anything  by 
halves  came  forth  at  last  the  victor. 

Among  the  missionary-fields  of  the  apostle  which  have 
an  imperishable  record  in  his  Epistles  that  of  the  churches 
of  Galatia  is  one  of  the  most  important.  It  is  remote  from 
our  purpose  to  enter  upon  a  discussion  of  the  question  of 
the  exact  location  of  these  churches,  that  is,  whether  they 
lay  in  the  Roman  province  in  which  were  the  cities  of 
Derbe  and  Lystra  or  in  the  northern  region  inhabited 
chiefly  by  Celts.  The  greater  probability  appears  to  be 
in  favour  of  the  former  hypothesis,  but  the  decision  of  the 
question  does  not  affect  the  character  of  Paul's  missionary 
work  and  the  conflict  in  which  he  was  involved  on  behalf 
of  the  Galatian  churches.  We  have  already  seen  that 
Paul  declares  expHcitly  in  Galatians  that  the  first  fourteen 
years  of  his  work  succeeding  his  visit  to  Peter  in  Jerusalem 
were  passed  in  "  the  regions  of  Syria  and  Cilicia,"  after 
which  he  went  up  to  Jerusalem  for  conference  with  the 
apostles.     On  the  contrary   the  writer  of  Acts  records  a 


THE   FIRST    YEARS  89 

mission  of  **  Barnabas  and  Saul "  in  Cyprus,  Pamphilia, 
Pisidia,  and  Lykaonia  (Acts  xiii.,  xiv.),  prior  to  the  con- 
ference in  Jerusalem.  Since  Paul  could  not  have  included 
these  regions  in  "  Syria  and  Cilicia,"  it  is  probable  that 
the  order  of  time  in  Acts  is  not  historical,  and  that  we 
have  here  one  of  the  many  deviations  of  this  book  from 
the  course  of  events  indicated  in  the  Epistles.  Although 
the  legendary  character  of  many  of  the  events  recorded 
in  these  chapters  is  evident,  the  account  of  the  journey 
appears  to  have  an  historical  basis  in  the  names  of  the 
cities  visited,  and  it  is  not  improbable  that  we  have  here 
such  a  narrative  of  the  beginnings  of  the  Galatian  churches 
as  might  have  been  written  at  the  end  of  the  first  or  the 
beginning  of  the  second  century  by  such  a  writer  from 
the  fragmentary  sources  at  his  disposal.  There  is  no 
reason  on  the  ground  of  intimations  in  the  Epistle  to  the 
Galatians  for  assuming  that  the  churches  of  that  name 
were  founded  prior  to  the  conference  in  Jerusalem.  The 
words  in  Gal.  ii.  5  :  ''To  whom  we  gave  place  by  subjec- 
tion, no,  not  for  an  hour,  that  the  truth  of  the  gospel  might 
continue  with  you,"  do  not  contain  such  an  implication, 
for  the  entire  fortune  of  the  gentile  mission  was  at  stake 
in  the  contest,  and  a  special  application  is  made  to  the 
Galatians  in  the  Epistle  as  gentiles  whose  interest  in  the 
issue  did  not  depend  upon  the  time  of  their  conversion. 
Gal.  iv.  13  contains  a  reference  to  two  visits  to  these 
churches  prior  to  the  writing  of  the  Epistle.  '*  Ye  know 
how,"  the  apostle  writes,  ''through  infirmity  of  the  flesh 
I  preached  the  gospel  to  you  at  the  first,"  that  is,  the  first 
time.  The  sources  at  our  disposal  do  not  make  this  matter 
clear  beyond  question,  and  we  cannot  do  better  than  resort 
to  Weizsacker's  conjecture  that  the  second  visit  was  on  the 
return  journey  of  the  first  missionary  tour  recorded  in 
Acts  xiv.  21-26,  or  that  it  occurred  on  the  second  mis- 
sionary journey  (Acts  xvi.). 


90  THE  MISSIONARY 

The  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  is  exceedingly  bare  of 
references  to  the  external  conditions  of  the  churches,  such 
as  their  locations,  the  journeys  made  in  founding  them,  and 
the  attendant  circumstances  and  incidents.  The  internal 
situation  was  the  urgent  matter  that  called  the  Epistle 
forth,  and  with  this  it  is  intensely  occupied.  Apart  from 
this  particular  exigency,  however,  occasional  intimations 
occur  which  throw  light  upon  the  antecedents  of  the  con- 
verts and  the  character  of  the  mission.  There  is  no  reason 
for  doubting  that  the  Galatian  churches  were  composed 
chiefly  of  converts  from  heathenism.  This  appears  from 
the  words :  ''  Howbeit,  then,  when  ye  knew  not  God,  ye 
did  service  unto  them  which  by  nature  are  no  gods  "  (Gal. 
iv.  8).  Not  the  existence,  but  the  divinity  of  the  beings 
formerly  worshipped,  is  here  denied.  They  belong  to  "  the 
weak  and  beggarly  elements,"  that  is,  elementary  powers 
mentioned  in  the  next  verse  which  were  associated  with 
the  Jewish  observance  of  ''  days  and  months  and  times 
and  years"  (verse  lo)  as  the  spirits  of  the  heavenly  bodies 
(Gal.  iv.  3).  In  iii.  13,  ''bought  us  off  from  the  curse  of 
the  law,"  "us"  apparently  refers  to  the  Jews,  but  the 
immediately  following  words,  "that  the  blessing  of  Abra- 
ham might  come  on  the  gentiles,"  denotes  that  not  Jewish- 
Christian,  but  gentile-Christian  readers  were  in  the  writer's 
mind.  To  these  simple-minded  idolaters  Paul,  detained 
among  them  by  his  infirmity,  preached  his  gospel  of  theism, 
of  the  one  true  God,  and  of  the  great  redemption  through 
Jesus  Christ,  of  the  sonship  into  which  they  were  born  by 
reason  of  their  acceptance  of  the  atonement,  of  the  Spirit 
which  as  sons  they  receive  (iv.  6),  of  the  love  of  God,  who 
sent  His  Son  to  deliver  them  "from  this  present  evil  world" 
(i.  4),  of  the  faith  through  which  they  received  the  Spirit  that 
by  works  could  not  have  been  theirs  (iii.  2),  and  of  the 
liberty  to  which  through  Christ  they  were  called  (v.    13). 


THE  FIRST    YEARS  9 1 

That  the  question  of  *'  another  gospel "  had  been  touched 
upon  in  his  preaching  either  on  his  first  or  second  visit  is 
clear  from  i.  9 :  *'  As  we  said  before,  so  say  I  now  again, 
if  any  man  preach  another  gospel ...  let  him  be  accursed," 
and  an  echo  of  the  contest  with  the  judaisers  is  plainly  heard 
in  the  words :  ''  For  I  testify  again  to  every  man  that  is 
circumcised  that  he  is  a  debtor  to  the  whole  law"  (v.  3). 
Here  "before"  and  ''again"  indicate  that  he  had  in  his 
original  teaching  warned  them  against  the  enemies  of  his 
gospel  who  might  come  to  "spy  out  their  liberty"  and 
"bring  them  into  bondage"  (ii.  4). 

The  unhappy  situation  which  called  forth  the  Epistle 
full  of  energy  and  passion  soon  intervened.  "  I  marvel," 
he  writes,  "that  ye  are  so  soon  removed  from  him  that 
called  you  into  the  grace  of  Christ  unto  another  gospel" 
(i.  6).  From  the  question  :  "  Am  I  therefore  become  your 
enemy,  because  I  tell  you  the  truth } "  we  may  infer  that 
his  opponents  had  so  represented  him  to  the  churches. 
He  doubtless  knew  to  whom  the  disturbance  of  the  faith 
of  his  converts  was  chargeable,  but  he  does  not  definitely 
indicate  him  or  them  in  the  Epistle.  In  immediate  con- 
nection he  speaks  of  one  and  more,  "he  who  troubleth 
you"  and  "they  who  trouble  you"  (v.  10,  12).  There  can 
be  no  question  as  to  the  source  from  which  the  "trouble" 
came  and  as  to  the  authorisation  of  those  who  had  made 
it.  The  rupture  at  Antioch  had  doubtless  made  the  juda- 
isers in  Jerusalem  more  than  ever  determined  to  employ 
every  means  in  their  power  to  uproot  the  Pauline  gospel. 
We  have,  indeed,  no  proof  that  James  or  Peter  or  John 
sent  emissaries  among  the  Galatians  to  antagonise  the 
apostle  by  sowing  disaffection  among  his  converts.  But 
that  such  a  work  should  have  been  undertaken  without  the 
sanction  of  those  in  authority  is  extremely  improbable. 
When  the  men  went  to  Antioch  to  set  Peter  right  from 


92  THE   MISSIONARY 

the  Jerusalem  point  of  view,  Paul  distinctly  says  that  they 
came  ''from  James,"  and  this  circumstance  furnishes  a 
presumption  in  favour  of  a  similar  authorisation  in  the  case 
in  hand.* 

What  was  the  message  which  these  emissaries  brought, 
and  what  were  their  arguments  ?  The  Galatians  believed 
that  in  becoming  Christians  they  had  an  inheritance  in  the 
kingdom  of  Christ.  So  Paul  had  doubtless  taught  them. 
If  they  were  sons  of  God  (iv.  5),  then  they  were  ''  heirs," 
who  would  at  Christ's  coming  in  his  kingdom  be  "glorified 
together"  with  him  (Rom.  viii.  17).  The  judaisers  doubt- 
less endeavoured  to  convince  them  that  they  were  not  really 
God's  people  and  could  not  be  until  they  entered  the 
ancient  and  only  true  household  of  faith  through  submis- 
sion to  Jewish  rites  (vi.  12,  13),  and  observed  the  Jewish 
forms,  days,  etc.  (iv.  10).  The  note  of  personal  sensitive- 
ness and  defence  in  the  Epistle  indicates  that  his  claim 
to  the  apostleship  had  also  been  impugned.  Hence  the 
earnest  defence  of  his  position,  the  reference  to  the  "reve- 
lation "  that  he  had  received,  and  the  assertion  of  his 
independence.  To  this  attack  upon  him  we  owe  the 
account  of  the  contest  with  Peter  in  Antioch,  for  which 

*  The  Epistles  to  the  Galatians  and  the  Corinthians  are  unintelligible  on 
the  theory  of  Paul's  relation  to  the  Jerusalem  apostles  put  forth  by  Lightfoot 
in  the  dissertation,  St.  Paul  and  the  Three,  in  St.  PauVs  Epistle  to  the  Gala- 
tians, 1866.  He  sees  in  Paul's  earlier  visit  to  Jerusalem  the  purpose  of  obtain- 
ing "  instruction  in  the  facts  of  the  gospel,"  and  accordingly  a  "  recognition  of 
the  authority  of  the  elder  apostles."  This  is  an  improbable  motive  to  attribute 
to  one  who  expressly  declares  that  he  did  not  confer  with  flesh  and  blood.  As 
to  recognising  the  "authority"  of  the  apostles,  nothing  is  more  evident  than 
that  he  nowhere  admits  their  superiority  to  himself.  Dr.  Lightfoot's  teaching, 
moreover,  that  in  the  conference  "  the  Three  "  admitted  in  Paul  "  a  perfect 
equality"  with  themselves,  is  not  supported  by  the  facts  which  the  Epistles 
disclose.  There  is  no  evidence  that  they  recognised  him  as  an  apostle.  On 
the  contrary,  James  sent  emissaries  to  Antioch  to  compel  Peter  to  act  in  direct 
antagonism  to  him,  as  one  without  coordinate  authority. 


THE   FIRST    YEARS  93 

the  writer  of  Acts  found  no  place  in  his  scheme  of  the 
history  of  primitive  Christianity.  A  few  words  in  the 
Epistle  indicate  the  power  wielded  by  the  apostles  in  Jeru- 
salem, and  show  the  grounds  of  Peter's  fear  of  "  those  who 
were  of  the  circumcision,"  when  he  withdrew  from  the 
gentiles  at  Antioch.  Paul  charges  the  emissaries  who  dis-^ 
turbed  the  Galatians  with  striving  to  constrain  them  to  be 
circumcised,  **  lest  they  [of  the  mission]  should  suffer  per- 
secution for  the  cross  of  Christ"  (vi.  12).  This  plainly 
shows  not  only  that  they  had  orders  to  go  among  the 
Galatians  on  this  mission,  but  also  that  they  did  not  dare 
refuse  for  fear  of  the  authorities.  To  suffer  persecution 
"for  the  cross  of  Christ"  meant  for  Paul  to  suffer  it  for 
advocating  his  gospel  that  in  the  cross  the  law  was  done 
away.  This  throws  light  on  a  difficult  passage  already 
considered :  "  If  I  yet  preach  circumcision,  why  am  I  yet 
persecuted"  (v.  \\)}  in  which,  it  has  been  conjectured,  he 
employs  substantially  the  words  of  his  opponents  who  may 
have  represented  to  the  Galatians  that  Paul  could  not  be 
preaching  the  right  kind  of  gospel  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  only  competent  authorities,  for  if  he  were,  why 
would  these  authorities  be  against  him  t 

The  answer  of  the  apostle  to  his  opponents  is  a  vindica- 
tion of  the  principles  of  his  own  gospel.  After  pronounc- 
ing a  curse  upon  those  who  pervert  the  truth  as  it  is  in 
Jesus  and  showing  the  grounds  on  which  his  apostleship 
rests,  he  makes  clear  to  the  Galatians  the  real  significance 
of  accepting  Judaism.  It  is  no  light  matter  to  assume  the 
yoke  of  the  law,  for  ''  he  who  is  circumcised  is  a  debtor  to  do 
the  whole  law  "  (v.  3).  He  that  is  under  the  law  is  "  under 
a  curse,"  for  it  is  written  in  the  law  itself  that  every  one 
is  cursed  ''  who  continueth  not  in  all  things  which  are 
written  in  the  book  of  the  law  to  do  them  "  (iii.  10).  Juda- 
ism in  its  observance  of  years  and  days  and  months  is  no 


94  THE  MISSIONARY 

better  than  the  heathenism  out  of  which  they  had  come, 
but  like  it  is  a  subjection  to  the  weak  and  beggarly  elemen- 
tal powers,  which  are  *'no  gods."  If  they  accept  circum- 
cision, ''Christ  is  become  of  no  effect,"  and  they  are  ** fallen 
from  grace,"  having  rejected  the  gospel  of  grace  whose 
righteousness  is  not  that  of  works.  He  shows  them  that 
all  that  the  judaisers  claim  for  themselves  as  inheritors 
of  the  promise  to  Abraham  belongs  also  to  the  gentiles 
on  the  condition  of  faith,  and  that  in  Christ  there  is  neither 
Jew  nor  Greek  (iii.  14-29).  Against  all  the  requirements 
of  the  judaisers  and  the  perils  of  accepting  them  he  lays 
down  the  one  injunction :  ''  Walk  in  the  Spirit,  and  ye 
shall  not  fulfil  the  lusts  of  the  flesh  "  ;  for  if  they  are  led  by 
the  Spirit  they  are  not  under  the  law  (v.  16,  18).  "The 
fruit  of  the  Spirit  is  love,  joy,  peace,  longsuffering,  gentle- 
ness, goodness,  faith,  meekness,  temperance."  Against 
those  who  do  these  things  the  law  can  make  no  charge 
(v.  22,  23).  This  brief  Epistle  is  one  of  the  most  impor- 
tant documents  of  primitive  Christianity  in  so  far  as  it 
reveals  the  condition  of  parties,  the  personality  and  strug- 
gles of  Paul,  and  the  powers  with  which  he  had  to  contend. 
If  it  is  one-sided  in  its  judgment  of  the  law  and  incomplete 
in  its  exposition  of  the  apostle's  gospel,  it  was  not  written 
with  the  purpose  of  expounding  either.  It  doubtless  in  a 
good  degree  attained  its  end  as  a  defence  of  the  author  and 
an  exhortation  to  the  churches.  On  the  south-Galatian 
theory  it  was  written  at  Antioch  soon  after  the  council  in 
Jerusalem,  and  subsequent  to  the  second  visit  to  Derbe  and 
Lystra.  Those  who  support  the  north-Galatian  hypothesis 
place  the  composition  at  Ephesus  in  the  year  55,  a  date 
which  must  be  changed  to  50  if  Harnack's  construction  be 
adopted. 


CHAPTER   V 

PHILIPPI,   THESSALONICA,   CORINTH 

THE  beginning  of  Paul's  missionary  work  in  Europe 
was  made  in  Philippi  of  Macedonia,  an  inland  city 
with  a  harbor,  Neapolis,  opening  into  the  ^gean  Sea  on 
the  north.  It  is  related  in  Acts  that  after  he  had  "  gone 
through  Phrygia  and  the  region  of  Galatia"  on  his  second 
missionary  journey,  he  was  ''forbidden  of  the  Holy  Ghost 
to  preach  the  word  in  Asia,"  and  that  in  a  "  vision  in  the 
night"  a  man  of  Macedonia  appeared  to  him  and  "prayed 
him  saying.  Come  over  into  Macedonia,  and  help  us  "  (xvi. 
6,  9).  The  mission  in  Philippi  is  mentioned  by  Paul  him- 
self in  I  Thess.  ii.  2,  where  he  speaks  of  sufferings  there 
which  appear  to  have  left  a  deep  impression  upon  him  and 
of  going  thence  to  Thessalonica.  His  companions  on  this 
mission  were  Timothy  and  Silas  (Acts  xv.  40,  xvi.  '1-4, 
xvii.  14,  15;  I  Thess.  i.  i,  iii.  2;  Phil.  i.  i,  ii.  19).  The 
account  in  Acts  of  the  apostle's  work  in  Philippi  is  very 
meagre,  but  a  portion  of  it  is  important,  since  it  is  based 
upon  the  ''  we-sections,"  which  were  probably  fragments 
of  a  journal  kept  by  one  of  his  companions.  The  limits  of 
these  sections  are  not  precisely  determinable,  and  we  do 
not  know  with  how  much  freedom  the  writer  of  Acts  em- 
ployed them.  Weizsacker  assigns  in  chapter  xvi.,  verses 
10-24  and  35-39,  to  the  ''we-sections."  It  is  not  certain 
that  there  was  a  synagogue  here,  although  that  there  were 
Jews  is  evident  from  Acts  xvi.  13:  "On  the  Sabbath  we 
went  out  of  the  city  by  a  river-side  where  prayer  was  wont 
to  be  made."     In  any  case,  there  is  no  mention  here  in  this 

95 


96  THE   MISSIONARY 

doubtless  most  trustworthy  source  of  Acts  of  an  attempt 
to  preach  to  the  Jews  —  a  procedure  which  is  elsewhere  so 
regularly  recorded  as  to  give  rise  to  the  suspicion  of  a 
purpose  on  the  part  of  the  writer  to  makd  it  appear  that 
the  gentile  mission  was  secondary  to  that  to  the  Jews  in 
the  apostle's  thought. 

Here  a  woman  "  named  Lydia,  a  seller  of  purple,  of  the 
city  of  Thyatira,  who  worshipped  God,  heard,"  was  con- 
verted, and  baptized  with  her  household  (Acts  xvi.  14). 
From  the  circumstance  that  she  "worshipped  God"  the 
inference  is  not  to  be  drawn  that  she  was  a  proselyte  to 
Judaism  (see  the  case  of  Cornelius,  Acts  x.  i,  2-28,  35,  xi. 
I,  18,  XV.  7).  In  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians  two  other 
women  are  mentioned,  Euodias  and  Syntyche  (Phil.  iv.  2). 
Mention  is  also  made  of  the  casting  out  of  an  unclean 
spirit  from  "a  certain  damsel"  (Acts  xvi.  16-18),  which 
may  be  regarded  as  an  example  of  the  "  miracles "  of 
which  Paul  speaks  as  the  signs  of  his  apostleship  (2  Cor. 
xii.  12)  and  as  among  the  ''gifts  of  the  Spirit"  (i  Cor.  xii. 
28).*     The  story  of  the  imprisonment  and  the  miraculous 

*  That  Paul  should  have  believed  himself  to  be  possessed  of  supernatural 
powers  is  not  surprising  when  we  consider  his  doctrine  of  the  Spirit.  The 
"  gifts  "  bestowed  by  this  indwelling  divine  principle  were  conceived  by  him 
to  be  supernatural  in  the  sense  that  they  came  from  God,  and  were  not  expli- 
cable as  productions  of  the  natural  human  faculties.  His  entire  theology,  his 
teaching  of  salvation,  of  Christology,  and  of  eschatology,  proceeds,  moreover, 
upon  premises  of  the  divine  interference.  It  is  true  that  he  does  not  often 
appeal  to  outward  "signs"  as  an  evidence  of  his  apostleship,  but  rather  to  his 
"  call  "  and  to  the  fruits  of  his  mission  (Gal.  i.  i ;  I  Cor.  ix.  I  f . ;  2  Cor.  iii.  2  f.). 
His  call,  however,  was  conceived  to  be  supernatural  and  effected  by  a  revela- 
tion by  God  of  His  Son  in  him  (Gal.  i.  1 6),  and  his  message  he  regarded  as  of 
the  same  origin  (i  Cor.  ii.  io-i6).  The  speaking  with  a  tongue,  in  which  he 
thanked  God  he  was  proficient  above  all  the  Corinthian  Christians,  he  thought 
to  be  one  of  the  gifts  of  the  Spirit  (i  Cor.  xii.  lo,  xiv.  1 8).  He  appears 
accordingly  to  have  believed  that  an  apostle  possessed  in  a  greater  measure 
than  other  Christians  the  supernatural  powers  common  to  all  of  them  as 
TTvevfjiaTLKoi  or  those  having  the  Spirit.     This  idea  is  implied  in  the  expression, 


PHI  LI  PPT,    TIIESSALONICA,    CORINTH  97 

deliverance  is  invalidated  not  only  by  its  legendary  feat- 
ures, but  by  the  improbability  that  Paul  should  have  allowed 
himself  to  be  ill  treated  when  the  mention  of  his  Roman 
citizenship  would  have  prevented  such  a  procedure,  as  is 
apparent  from  the  account  itself  (Acts  xvi.  37,  38).  "Only 
one  thing  stands  here,"  says  Weizsacker,  "not  as  the 
kernel  of  the  narrative,  but  as  the  condition  of  its  origin, 
that  during  his  sojourn  in  Philippi  Paul  was  in  great  dis- 
tress .  .  .  and  was  obliged  to  flee."  When  five  years 
later  (58,  according  to  the  generally  accepted  chronology) 
he  went  from  Ephesus  the  second  time  into  Macedonia, 
giving  "much  exhortation"  to  the  believers  (Acts  xx.  2), 
he  says  that  he  had  no  rest,  "without  were  fightings, 
within  were  fears"  (2  Cor.  vii.  5  ;  see  also  i.  16,  ii.  13),  but 
the  character  of  his  opponents  is  not  mentioned.  A  visit 
to  Philippi  is  doubtless  implied. 

About  ten  years  after  the  establishment  of  the  church  in 
Philippi  Paul  wrote  a  letter  to  the  believers  here  from  his 
prison  in  Rome.  That  in  the  interval  other  letters  were 
written  them  is  probable,  but  the  canonical  Epistle  to  the 
Philippians  is  the  only  one  that  has  been  preserved,  and  is 
our  sole  source  oi  information  as  to  the  relations  of  the 
apostle  with  this  church.  From  this  we  learn  that  these 
relations  were  undisturbed  by  such  unhappy  complications 
as  those  in  the  Galatian  churches.     There  is  no  intimation 

"  signs  of  an  apostle."  That  the  gift  to  perform  "  miracles  "  as  well  as  various 
wonderful  works  was  thought  to  be  possessed  by  others  than  apostles  is  evident 
from  I  Cor.  xii.  8-10,  28.  The  Epistles  of  Paul  furnish  no  data  for  forming  a 
conception  of  the  nature  of  these  "  signs "  (a-riixeia)  and  "  mighty  works " 
(dvmixeis).  They  were  phenomena  of  an  age  in  which  ignorance  of  the 
natural  forces  gave  free  scope  to  the  invoking  of  supernatural  powers  for  their 
explanation.  Events  doubtless  similar  received  a  like  explanation  one  hundred 
years  later  by  Justin  Martyr  (Apol.  ii.  6;  Dial.  30,  39).  Compare  the  account 
in  Acts  XX.  7  ff.  of  the  resuscitation  by  the  apostle  of  a  young  man  supposed  to 
be  dead. 

H 


98  THE  MISSIONARY 

that  the  judaising  opponents  found  their  way  to  the  believ- 
ers here.  In  the  Epistle  he  thanks  God  for  their  "  fellow- 
ship in  the  gospel  from  the  first  day  until  now"  (Phil.  i.  5). 
He  exhorts  them  to  maintain  unity  without  intimating  that 
deplorable  divisions  had  taken  place  among  them  :  "■  Stand 
fast  in  one  spirit,  with  one  mind  striving  together  for  the 
faith  of  the  gospel "  (i.  27).  He  commends  them  for 
having  **  always  obeyed,"  not  only  in  his  presence,  but  also 
in  his  absence  (ii.  12),  and  calls  them  "  dearly  beloved  and 
longed  for,"  his  ''joy  and  crown"  (iv.  i).  That  he  saw 
the  need  of  exhortations  regarding  their  relations  to  one 
another  perhaps  on  account  of  the  self-exaltation  of  some 
may  be  inferred  from  ii.  4-10,  where  he  counsels  them  to 
consideration  of  one  another,  and  enforces  his  admonition 
by  reference  to  the  example  of  Christ  who  *'  made  himself 
of  no  reputation,  and  took  upon  him  the  form  of  a  servant, 
and  was  made  in  the  likeness  of  men,"  The  kindly  rela- 
tions existing  between  him  and  the  Philippians  are  indi- 
cated by  the  fact  that  he  received  more  than  once  support 
from  them,  notwithstanding  his  boast  that  he  earned  his 
bread  with  his  own  hands  (i  Thess.  ii.  9;  i  Cor.  iv.  12,  ix. 
4-18).  He  tells  the  Corinthians  that  what  was  lacking  to 
him  *' the  brethren  from  Macedonia  supplied  "  (2  Cor.  xi.  9), 
and  writes  to  the  Philippians  themselves  that  they  had 
"once  and  again"  sent  to  his  necessities  (iv.  15,  16),  and 
out  of  his  imprisonment  he  "rejoices  in  the  Lord"  that 
now  at  the  last  their  "  care  for  him  hath  flourished  again  " 
(iv.  10),  and  in  ii.  25  he  mentions  Epaphroditus  as  their 
messenger  who  had  come  to  him  and  ministered  to  his 
wants. 

The  Epistle  contains  numerous  exhortations  to  unity, 
indeed,  and  it  is  apparent  that  information  had  reached  the 
apostle  of  certain  divisions,  "  murmurings,  and  disputings." 
He  beseeches  Euodias  and  Syntychc  that  they  be  "  of  the 


PHILIPPI,    TBESSALONICA,    CORINTH  99 

same  mind  in  the  Lord,"  and  admonishes  the  believers 
generally  to  let  their  moderation  be  known  unto  all  men, 
for  ''the  Lord  is  at  hand,"  as  if  personal  strife  and  passion 
were  trivial  in  view  of  the  great  consummation  of  the 
Parousia  (iv.  2,  5).  But  we  are  not  warranted  in  supposing 
that  any  such  conflict  existed  in  the  church  as  divided  the 
churches  of  Galatia,  or  that  if  there  was  a  Jewish-Christian 
party  in  it  they  had  taken  the  extreme  ground  that  the 
gentile  Christians  must  submit  to  Jewish  rites.  Opponents 
actual  or  possible  from  whom  danger  existed  or  was  threat- 
ened are  mentioned  in  severe  terms  with  a  warning  against 
them  in  iii.  2,  18.  They  are  ''dogs,"  and  "enemies  of  the 
cross  of  Christ,"  "evil  workers,"  and  "of  the  concision," 
while  the  Christians  are  "  the  circumcision,"  that  is,  repre- 
sent the  true  circumcision  of  the  heart,  and  "  have  no  con- 
fidence in  the  flesh."  The  most  probable  reference  in 
these  passages  is  to  a  Jewish  influence  from  without,  from 
which  danger  was  apprehended.  The  want  of  unity  which 
evidently  attracted  the  apostle's  attention  may  very  likely 
have  been  between  Jewish  and  gentile  Christians.  But  the 
distinct  expression  of  Paul's  gratitude  for  the  "  fellowship 
in  the  gospel  "  excludes  all  deep-seated  doctrinal  differences. 
From  Philippi  Paul  and  his  companions  went  by  way  of 
Amphipolis  and  Apollonia  to  Thessalonica,  where  accord- 
ing to  Acts  xvii.  2  he  immediately  devoted  himself  to 
a  Jewish-Christian  instead  of  a  gentile  mission.  On  the 
contrary,  the  apostle  afterwards  wrote  to  this  church  as 
if  it  were  composed  of  converts  from  heathenism  :  "  Ye 
turned,"  he  says,  "to  God  from  idols  to  serve  the  living 
and  true  God"  (i  Thess.  i.  9).  Again  he  writes  them 
that,  just  as  the  churches  of  God  which  are  in  Judea  had 
been  persecuted  by  the  Jews,  so  they  have  suffered  from 
their  own  countrymen  (ii.  14).  Distressed  after  his  arrival 
in  Athens  about  the  condition  of  the  Thessalonians,  when 


lOO  THE   MISSIONARY 

he  "could  no  longer  forbear,"  he  sent  Timothy  to  them  to 
''establish  and  comfort"  them  in  their  faith  (i  Thess.  iii. 
I,  2).  This  ''brother  and  minister  of  God"  brought  him 
in  Corinth  "good  tidings  of  their  faith  and  charity,"  so 
that  he  was  "greatly  comforted"  in  all  his  affliction  and 
distress  (verses  6,  7).  This  first  Epistle  gives  important 
information  as  to  the  situation  in  Thessalonica  on  the  con- 
dition that  its  genuineness  is  established.  It  has  been 
contested  on  grounds  which  can  hardly  be  regarded  as 
sufficient  to  warrant  its  rejection.  The  account  of  the 
founding  of  the  church  sounds,  indeed,  like  a  narrative 
made  to  persons  who  knew  nothing  of  the  matter  rather 
than  to  those  who  already  had  a  knowledge  of  it,  and  the 
reference  to  the  church  as  "  ensamples  to  all  that  believe 
in  Macedonia  and  Achaia  "  has  been  thought  to  denote  a 
later  period.  The  distinctive  Pauline  doctrines  of  faith  and 
justification,  of  the  law,  and  of  the  atonement  are  not 
referred  to  in  the  Epistle,  or  at  least  receive  no  detailed 
exposition.  But  the  internal  evidences  of  Pauline  author- 
ship far  outweigh  the  indications  to  the  contrary.  The 
apostle's  style  and  mode  of  thought  are  distinctly  evident, 
especially  in  the  greeting,  the  exhortations,  and  the  con- 
cluding words.  The  doctrine  of  the  resurrection  as  the 
ground  of  the  believers'  hope  at  the  coming  of  Christ, 
when  "God  will  bring  with  him"  those  "who  are  asleep 
in  Jesus"  reminds  us  of  i  Cor.  xv.  22,  23  (i  Thess.  iv. 
14,  V.  10).  The  wrath  of  God  and  deliverance  from  it 
through  the  death  of  Christ  (i.  10,  iv.  9  f.)  are  distinctly 
Pauline  conceptions  (see  2  Cor.  v.  15;  Phil.  iii.  10;  Rom. 
xiv.  7-9). 

Pfleiderer  calls  attention  to  "a  still  more  compelling 
reason  against  a  later  authorship  "  in  the  expression  of 
the  apostle's  expectation  that  he  would  survive  the  coming 
of  Christ,  contained  in  the  words,  "  we  who  are  alive  and 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  1 01 

remain  unto  the  coming  of  the  Lord"  (iv.  15).  **This  no 
one  could  have  written  after  Paul's  death."  This  Epistle 
was  written  from  Corinth  by  Paul,  Silvanus,  and  Timothy 
perhaps  within  a  year  after  his  mission  in  Thessalonica, 
probably  about  54  or  55,  if  we  assume  34  or  35  as  the  date 
of  his  conversion,  instead  of  30  according  to  Harnack. 
Although  it  is  a  joint  letter  (i.  i),  the  apostle  frequently 
takes  occasion  to  speak  in  his  own  name,  and  it  bears 
throughout  the  impress  of  his  personality.  The  report 
which  Timothy  had  brought,  while  on  the  whole  encour- 
aging, as  we  have  seen,  evidently  impressed  the  apostle 
with  the  conviction  that  the  church  needed  certain  exhor- 
tations as  to  Christian  conduct.  There  was  something 
"lacking"  in  their  faith  and  in  their  "love  toward  one 
another"  (iii.  10,  11).  He  would  have  them  "abound 
more  and  more  "  in  accordance  with  the  precepts  he  had 
given  (iv.  i,  10).  There  is  a  plain  intimation  that  some 
of  them  had  gone  astray  and  needed  to  be  admonished 
to  "abstain  from  fornication"  and  from  defrauding  one 
another  (iv.  3,  6).  Some  were  troubled  as  to  the  future 
fortune  at  the  coming  of  Christ  of  those  of  their  friends 
who  had  died,  and  he  tells  them  that  when  Christ  shall 
descend  from  heaven  "the  dead  in  Christ"  will  be  raised, 
since  Jesus  himself  had  been  raised  from  the  dead  (iv.  14- 
17).  The  "unruly"  needed  to  be  warned,  the  "feeble- 
minded" comforted,  and  the  "weak"  supported,  and  these 
offices  the  brethren  should  themselves  perform  (v.  14). 
Those  who  "laboured  among"  them  and  were  "over 
them  in  the  Lord  "  were  not  duly  esteemed,  and  all  the 
believers  were  apparently  not  "  at  peace  "  among  them- 
selves (v.  12,  13).  It  is  evident  in  the  note  of  personal 
defence  that  charges  against  Paul  had  been  made  in  some 
quarters,  perhaps  from  the  heathen  opponents,  which  he 
thought    ought   to   be    answered.       Hence    his    disclaim- 


102  THE  MISSIONARY 

ing  of  ''deceit,"  "flattery,"  *' covetousness,"  etc.  (ii.  4, 
5,  6,  9). 

The  second  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians  furnishes  no 
new  information  of  importance  regarding  the  conditions  in 
the  church  at  Thessalonica  even  on  the  hypothesis  of  its 
genuineness.  It  is,  however,  very  doubtful  that  it  came 
from  the  hand  of  Paul.  The  slight  deviations  from  Paul- 
ine usage  in  words  and  forms  of  expression  are  hardly 
sufficient  to  support  an  argument  against  its  genuineness. 
But  the  indications  of  imitation  both  in  the  substance 
and  form  are  suspicious,  and  Schmiedel  concludes  that  the 
turns  of  expression  are  to  such  a  degree  drawn  from  the 
first  Epistle  as  would  have  been  impossible  for  Paul  him- 
self without  a  fresh  reading  of  it.  The  so-called  "  little 
apocalypse"  (ii.  1-12)  is  almost  certainly  spurious  on  ac- 
count of  its  disagreement  with  what  the  first  Epistle  teaches 
as  to  "the  last  things"  or  the  Parousia.  According  to 
ii.  5  Paul  had  "  told  "  the  Thessalonians  that  certain  definite 
signs  would  precede  the  second  coming  of  Christ,  the  ap- 
pearance of  "the  man  of  sin,"  "the  son  of  perdition" 
(ii.  3  f.).  If  this  is  genuine,  he  must  have  taught  them 
orally  the  direct  opposite  of  what  he  wrote  them  in  the 
first  Epistle.  For  in  this  he  says  that  the  day  of  the  Lord 
will  "come  as  a  thief  in  the  night"  (i  Thess.  v.  2),  and 
tells  them  that  they  know  this  perfectly,  as  if  he  had  so 
taught  them.  "  Sudden  destruction "  will  come  upon 
those  who  "  cry  peace  and  safety."  This  certainly  means 
an  unexpected  coming  of  the  great  day,  and  is  incompati- 
ble with  such  preceding  signs  as  are  mentioned  in  the 
second  letter.  In  the  first  Epistle  he  declines  to  tell  them 
anything  about  the  "times  and  the  seasons  "  of  the  advent, 
since  they  knew  well  that  its  coming  is  without  warning, 
like  that  of  a  thief. 

In  the  second  letter,  on  the  contrary,  he  enters  into  this 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  103 

very  question,  and  warns  the  believers  against  thinking 
that  the  day  is  "at  hand,"  and  plainly  tells  them  that  they 
will  know  by  certain  signs  when  to  expect  it.  The  warn- 
ing against  being  misled  by  spurious  letters  purporting  to 
come  from  the  apostle  (ii.  2)  is  suspicious.  There  is  no 
trace  of  such  letters  written  during  the  lifetime  of  the 
apostle,  and  the  improbability  against  the  existence  of  them 
is  great.  An  intensifying  of  the  first  Epistle  is  manifest 
in  several  features  of  the  second,  particularly  in  all  that 
relates  to  the  catastrophe  of  the  end.  Here  we  have 
Christ  *'  taking  vengeance  in  flaming  fire,"  and  instead  of 
the  "  sudden  destruction "  of  i  Thess.  v.  3  which  would 
come  upon  those  who  cry  peace  and  safety,  the  second 
letter  tells  of  a  punishment  with  "  everlasting  destruction  " 
to  be  visited  upon  "  those  who  know  not  God,  and  obey 
not  the  gospel  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ "  (i.  8).  As  if, 
moreover,  the  evil  tendencies  in  those  who  are  to  '*  perish" 
were  not  sufficient  to  compass  their  ruin,  the  writer 
represents  that  "  God  will  send  them  a  strong  delusion, 
that  they  should  believe  a  lie,  that  they  all  might  be 
damned"  (ii.  ii,  12).  The  hypothesis  of  a  genuine  let- 
ter consisting  substantially  of  i.  1-4  and  ii.  13  —  iii.  18, 
which  was  interpolated  prior  to  the  year  70,  can  hardly 
be  sustained,  since  it  leaves  such  a  fragment  as  Paul 
would  hardly  have  written.  The  portions  omitted  on  this 
hypothesis  constitute  the  kernel  of  the  Epistle. 

Of  the  succeeding  fortunes  of  the  Macedonian  churches 
Acts  gives  us  no  information,  although  it  mentions  a 
visit  of  the  apostle  to  that  region  (xx.  1-3).  But  the 
second  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians  written  thence  throws 
some  light  upon  the  conditions  existing  there  four  or  five 
years  after  the  founding  of  the  churches.  He  wishes  the 
Corinthians  to  know  of  "  the  grace  of  God  bestowed  upon 
the  churches  of  Macedonia,  how  that  in  a  great  trial  of 


104  THE  MISSIONARY 

affliction  the  abundance  of  their  joy  and  their  deep  poverty 
abounded  unto  the  riches  of  their  liberaUty  "  (2  Cor.  viii. 
I,  2).  The  natural  inference  from  his  words  is  that  the 
distress  was  so  great  that  he  could  not  find  it  in  his  heart 
to  ask  them  to  contribute  to  the  collection  that  he  was 
making  for  the  needy  Christians.  He  says,  however :  *'  To 
their  power  I  bear  record,  yes,  and  beyond  their  power 
they  were  willing  of  themselves,  praying  us  with  much 
entreaty  that  we  should  receive  the  gift,  and  take  upon  us 
the  fellowship  of  the  ministering  to  the  saints  "  (2  Cor. 
viii.  3,  4).  *' Not  as  we  hoped,"  he  says,  "but  first  gave 
themselves  to  the  Lord  and  unto  us  by  the  will  of  God." 
So  freely  and  liberally  did  they  give,  that  he  calls  their 
generosity  a  giving  of  themselves.  The  apostle  wishes 
that  through  the  visit  of  Titus  to  the  Corinthians  in  the 
interest  of  the  collection  "  the  same  grace  "  may  be  com- 
pleted in  them  also.  With  Titus  Paul  sends  from  Mace- 
donia two  companions  to  the  Corinthians,  one  of  whom  he 
calls  ''  the  brother  whose  praise  is  in  the  gospel  throughout 
all  the  churches."  The  other  he  designates  as  ''our 
brother,  whom  we  have  oftentimes  proved  diligent  in  many 
things"  (2  Cor.  viii.  18,  22).  Conjecture  as  to  who  these 
men  were  is  fruitless.  In  Acts  xx.  4  mention  is  made  of 
two  men  from  Thessalonica  as  companions  of  Paul  on  his 
journey  with  the  collection,  Aristarchus  and  Secundus, 
but  we  cannot  certainly  connect  these  with  the  two  men- 
tioned in  2  Cor.  viii.  18,  22. 

According  to  i  Thess.  iii.  i  Paul  was  in  Athens  when  he 
sent  Timothy  to  Thessalonica  to  establish  the  church  and 
comfort  them  concerning  their  faith.  In  i  Cor.  xvi.  15  he 
speaks  of  '*the  house  of  Stephanas"  as  "the  first  fruits  of 
Achaia,"  and  in  2  Cor.  i.  i  he  addresses  "the  church  of 
God  which  is  at  Corinth  with  all  the  saints  who  are  in  all 
Achaia."     That  in  Achaia  there  were  believers  outside  of 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  105 

Corinth  is  accordingly  probable.  We  are  not  warranted, 
however,  in  assuming  a  ministry  in  the  Pauline  sense  and 
the  founding  of  a  church  in  Athens.  That  Paul  while  in 
Athens  was  inactive  and  silent  is  hardly  probable  from  our 
knowledge  of  him,  and  the  mention  of  Dionysius  and  the 
woman  Damaris  (Acts  xvii.  34)  has  the  appearance  of 
being  derived  from  an  historical  source.  The  historical 
value  of  the  account  as  a  whole  is,  however,  doubtful. 
That  Paul's  spirit  should  have  been  *'  stirred  within  him  " 
at  sight  of  a  ''city  wholly  given  up  to  idolatry"  is  not 
improbable ;  but  why  on  this  account  he  should  have  dis- 
puted "  in  the  synagogue  with  the  Jews  and  with  the  devout 
persons"  is  not  apparent  (Acts  xvii.  16,  17).  The  address 
attributed  to  the  apostle  on  Mars'  Hill,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  impossibility  of  its  being  reproduced  with  anything  like 
accuracy  forty  or  fifty  years  later,  does  credit  to  the  inven- 
tion of  the  author  ;  but  we  miss  in  reading  it  the  distinctive 
Pauline  traits.  It  contains  no  message  of  salvation  through 
Christ,  who  is  represented  simply  as  the  agent  of  divine 
judgment;  and  the  summons  to  repentance,  because  God 
"  will  judge  the  world,"  is  more  after  the  manner  of  John 
the  Baptist  than  of  Paul.  In  any  case,  whatever  one  may 
think  of  the  discourse  as  Pauline  or  unpauline,  it  is  improb- 
able that  so  important  an  event  as  a  ministry  in  Athens, 
discussions  with  Greek  philosophers,  and  an  address  to  the 
enlightened  Athenians  on  Mars'  Hill  would  not  have  been 
mentioned  by  the  apostle,  if  it  ever  occurred. 

Of  the  church  in  Corinth,  the  history  of  which  is  of  the 
greatest  importance  for  a  knowledge  of  the  mission  among 
the  gentiles,  of  the  personality  and  methods  of  Paul,  and 
of  his  relations  with  the  Jerusalem  authorities,  we  should 
know  nothing  of  value  if  we  had  no  other  source  of  infor- 
mation than  Acts  (xviii.  1-19).  The  writer  of  this  book, 
for  reasons  about  which  it  is  useless  to  speculate,  tells  us 


I06  THE   MISSIONARY 

nothing  of  the  inner  history  of  the  church,  nothing  of  the 
parties  and  their  conflicts,  nothing  of  the  Epistles  or  of  the 
occasions  that  called  them  forth,  and  nothing  of  the  skil- 
ful deaHng  of  the  apostle  with  the  trying  emergencies 
which  confronted  him  there.  That  he  should  have  been 
unacquainted  with  the  Pauline  Epistles  appears  incredible, 
and  his  omissions  here  as  well  as  his  passing  over  in  silence 
of  the  important  episode  of  the  conflict  of  Peter  and  Paul 
at  Antioch  constitute  one  of  the  unsolved  problems  of  his 
problematical  work.  From  his  narrative  it  would  appear 
that  Paul  was  primarily  occupied  with  a  mission  to  the 
Jews,  and  did  not  think  of  preaching  to  the  gentiles  until 
the  Jews  rejected  him.  This  is  not  in  accord  with  Gal.  i. 
i6,  and  has  not  the  slightest  support  in  the  Corinthian 
Epistles.  Not  only  are  the  omissions  noteworthy,  but  the 
brief  account  of  the  mission  leaves  much  to  be  desired 
regarding  the  matters  with  which  it  deals.  Paul  goes 
immediately  to  a  Jew  of  Pontus  lately  come  from  Italy, 
and  stays  with  him  because  the  two  are  of  the  same  handi- 
craft, tentmakers.  Of  this  Aquila  and  his  wife  Prisca 
("  Priscilla"  is  a  diminutive)  we  are  not  told  whether  they 
became  Christians  or  not,  and  if  we  may  infer  that  they 
did,  whether  or  no  they  were  converted  by  Paul.  The 
apostle  goes  at  once  to  the  synagogue,  and  "  reasons  "  there 
"  every  sabbath,"  how  many  sabbaths,  we  are  not  told. 
But  during  all  this  time  it  would  appear  that  he  was  reason- 
ing about  something  else  than  Christianity,  for  he  did  not 
''testify  that  Jesus  was  Christ,"  until  "Silas  and  Timothy 
came  from  Macedonia,"  when  he  was  "pressed  in  spirit," 
and  took  up  the  subject  of  his  mission.  There  is  no  inti- 
mation that  during  this  period  he  had  thought  that  he  was 
the  divinely  appointed  apostle  to  the  gentiles  (Acts  xviii. 
1-6).  Only  when  the  Jews  "  opposed  themselves,  and 
blasphemed,"  did  he  "shake  his  raiment,"  and  declare  that 
he  would  "  go  to  the  gentiles." 


PHI  LIP  PI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  lO/ 

It  is  from  the  Corinthian  Epistles  (57-58)  that  we  learn 
whatever  may  be  known  of  the  founding  of  the  church 
in  Corinth  and  of  its  internal  history  during  the  first 
years  of  its  existence.  The  apostle  writes  that  the  gospel 
of  the  Son  of  God  was  here  preached  by  himself  and 
Silvanus  and  Timothy  (2  Cor.  i.  19);  that  he  was  the 
founder  of  the  church  (i  Cor.  iii.  6);  that  the  Christians 
here  are  his  "work  in  the  Lord"  (i  Cor.  ix.  i);  and  that 
though  they  ''  have  ten  thousand  instructors  in  Christ,  they 
have  not  many  fathers,"  for  in  Christ  Jesus  he  begot  them 
in  the  gospel  (i  Cor.  iv.  15).  He  says  that  his  message  to 
them  was  only  "Jesus  Christ  and  him  crucified"  (i  Cor.  ii. 
2);  that  he  was  with  them  "in  weakness  and  fear  and 
much  trembling,"  "not  in  enticing  words  of  man's  wisdom, 
but  in  demonstration  of  the  Spirit  and  of  power"  (i  Cor. 
ii-  3-5);  that  he  could  not  speak  unto  them  "as  unto 
spiritual,  but  as  unto  carnal,",  feeding  them  as  babes  with 
"milk"  (i  Cor.  iii.  1-3);  and  that  in  his  preaching  he  had 
nothing  to  glory  of,  for  a  "  necessity  was  laid  upon  him  " 
(i  Cor.  ix.  16).  The  church  was  composed  chiefly  of  the 
common  people,  "  not  many  wise  after  the  flesh,  not  many 
mighty,  not  many  noble"  (i  Cor.  i.  26),  although  from  the 
requirement  to  give  bountifully  (2  Cor.  ix.  6)  it  may  be 
inferred  that  some  were  at  least  not  poor.  That  the  mis- 
sion began  among  the  gentiles  is  apparent  from  the  men- 
tion of  Stephanas  as  the  "  first  fruits "  whom  and  his 
household  Paul  himself  baptized  (i  Cor.  xvi.  15).  The 
apostle  writes  to  the  believers  here  as  if  they  were  chiefly 
converts  from  heathenism.  "Ye  know,"  he  says,  "that  ye 
were  gentiles,  carried  away  unto  these  dumb  idols,  even  as 
ye  were  led  "  (i  Cor.  xii.  2);  yet  there  were  evidently  some 
converts  from  Judaism  (i  Cor.  vii.  18,  ix.  20,  xii.  13).  It  is 
noteworthy  that  in  his  account  of  the  beginnings  of  his 
ministry  in  Corinth  he  makes  no  mention  of  the  persecu- 


I08  THE  MISSIONARY 

tions  and  perils  related  in  Acts.  His  timidity  and  "fear" 
are  to  be  ascribed  to  his  want  of  confidence  in  himself  as 
a  public  speaker,  who  could  not  employ  the  rhetorical 
methods  to  which  the  people  in  this  cultivated  community 
were  accustomed.  He  could  rise  above  all  personal  defi- 
ciencies only  by  the  power  of  the  word  which  he  had  to 
speak. 

What  the  substance  of  the  apostle's  message  to  the 
Corinthians  was  may  be  learned  chiefly  from  the  first  Epis- 
tle, although,  from  the  fact  that  it  was  written  in  answer  to 
questions  that  arose  after  he  had  left  them,  we  must  con- 
clude that  it  treats  of  some  matters  not  included  in  his  oral 
teaching.  ''The  gospel  which  he  preached  to  them,"  he 
says,  was  that  of  the  death  of  Christ  ''  for  our  sins,"  his 
resurrection,  and  his  manifestation  to  the  apostles  and  last 
of  all  to  himself  (i  Cor.  xv.  i-8).  By  this  gospel  they  will 
be  ''saved,"  if  they  keep  in  memory  what  he  preached  to 
them.  He  also  delivered  to  them  what  he  had  "received 
of  the  Lord  "  respecting  the  last  supper  (i  Cor.  xi.  23-25). 
The  kernel  of  his  gospel,  however,  was  evidently  that 
apprehension  of  the  cross  which  was  to  the  Jews  a  stum- 
bling-block and  an  "  offence  "  to  the  Jewish  Christians.  So 
we  must  doubtless  understand  i  Cor.  i.  23.  That  in  a  mes- 
sage to  idolaters,  however,  the  preaching  of  the  one  God 
occupied  the  foremost  place,  and  was  made  fundamental 
to  the  entire  message  is  antecedently  probable,  and  indica- 
tions are  not  wanting  in  the  Epistles  that  this  was  the 
course  pursued.  He  writes  to  the  believers  what  he  must 
before  have  preached  to  them  that  "  an  idol  is  nothing  in 
the  world,  and  that  there  is  none  other  God  but  one." 
Though  "there  be  gods  many  and  lords  many,"  "to  us," 
he  declares,  "  there  is  but  one  God,  the  Father,  of  whom 
are  all  things,  and  we  in  Him  "  (i  Cor.  viiL  4-6).  He  tells 
them  that  formerly  they  "  were  carried  away  unto  these 


PHI  LIP  PI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  109 

dumb  idols"  (i  Cor.  xii.  2).  But  the  way  to  this  one  God 
was  shown  to  be  through  Christ,  and  he  was  preached 
among  them  as  ''the  Son  "  (2  Cor.  i.  19).  It  was  God  who 
established  the  preachers  along  with  the  hearers,  who 
anointed  them,  and  sealed  them,  and  gave  them  "the 
earnest  of  the  Spirit";  but  this  was  done  "in  Christ" 
(2  Cor.  i.  21,  22).  Through  God  Christ  Jesus  in  whom  they 
are  is  made  to  them  "  wisdom  and  righteousness  and  sanc- 
tification  and  redemption"  (i  Cor.  i.  30).  Jesus  died  for 
all,  that  they  who  live  should  not  henceforth  live  to  them- 
selves, but  to  him  who  died  for  them  and  rose  again,"  and 
if  any  man  be  "in  him,"  he  is  a  new  creation;  old  things 
are  passed  away;  behold,  all  things  are  become  new" 
(2  Cor.  v.  15,  17).  In  Christ  the  believer  comes  into  a  spirit- 
ual fellowship  in  which  new  and  noble  ethical  motives  pre- 
vail. The  body  has  become  a  "member  of  Christ,"  and 
should  not  be  debased  to  unholy  uses,  is  "the  temple  of 
the  Holy  Ghost "  which  is  in  them,  which  they  have  of 
God,  and  they  are  not  their  own.  They  are  "  bought  with 
a  price,"  and  should  glorify  God  in  their  spirit  and  their 
body  "which  are  God's"  (i  Cor.  vi.  20). 

The  organisation  of  the  little  religious  community,  which 
probably  assembled  in  a  private  house,  as  in  Ephesus 
(i  Cor.  xvi.  19),  is  not  clearly  defined  in  the  Epistles. 
Intimations  are,  however,  not  wanting,  which  throw  some 
light  upon  the  matter.  Among  these  nothing  appears  to 
favour  the  supposition  that  men  were  appointed  to  govern- 
ing positions  with  official  titles,  according  to  the  represen- 
tation in  Acts  to  the  effect  that  it  was  the  apostle's  custom 
to  "ordain  elders"  in  every  church  (Acts  xiv.  23).  Paul 
does  not  intimate  that  he  assumed  such  a  function  in  his 
churches.  On  the  contrary,  the  organisation  appears  at 
first  to  have  had  a  much  simpler  form  than  the  writer  of 
Acts  supposes,  who  looked  upon  the  matter  from  the  point 


no  THE   MISSIONARY 

of  view  of  a  later  time.  .  In  i  Cor.  xii.  28  the  apostle  enu- 
merates certain  classes  of  persons  whom  ''God  hath  set  in 
the  church,"  and  mentions  successively  apostles,  prophets, 
teachers,  miracles,  gifts  of  healing,  helps,  governments, 
diversities  of  tongues.  None  of  these  appear  to  have  been 
formally  ''ordained,"  and  the  natural  inference  from  the 
passage  is  that  each  one  took  upon  himself,  probably  with 
the  tacit  consent  of  the  others,  such  functions  as  his  gifts 
fitted  him  to  perform.  When  the  apostle  calls  attention 
to  irregularities  in  the  church,  he  mentions  no  titled  func- 
tionary with  authority  to  control  and  to  check  extrava- 
gances, but  appeals  to  the  little  community  as  a  whole 
(i  Cor.  v.  3-5;  2  Cor.  ii.  6),  which  elects  its  envoys,  and 
in  which  there  are  no  distinctions  of  rank,  sex,  or  race 
(i  Cor.  xii.  13,  xvi.  3).  The  relation  of  the  organisation 
to  that  of  the  heathen  cult-associations  cannot  be  precisely 
ascertained,  but  it  is  probable  that,  while  similarities  may 
have  existed,  the  needs  of  the  church  were  the  determining 
factor.  Under  "governments"  may  be  included  a  presid- 
ing officer,  but  there  is  no  indication  that  a  title  belonged 
to  him,  and  the  supposition  is  not  improbable  that  the 
persons  first  converted  took  an  active  part  in  the  manage- 
ment of  affairs,  and  thus  naturally  attained  a  leadership 
either  by  tacit  common  consent  or  by  election. 

There  must  in  any  case  be  assumed  the  freedom  of  a 
self-governing  body  to  adapt  itself  to  circumstances  and 
provide  for  such  needs  as  its  situation  and  development 
made  apparent.  In  Corinth  the  first  convert  appears  to 
have  held  a  prominent  position  in  the  church  when  the 
first  Epistle  was  written,  for  the  apostle  exhorts  the  be- 
lievers as  follows  :  "  I  beseech  you,  brethren  (ye  know  the 
house  of  Stephanas,  that  it  is  the  first  fruits  of  Achaia, 
and  that  they  have  addicted  themselves  to  the  ministry  of 
the  saints),  that  ye  submit  yourselves  unto   such  and  to 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  in 

every  one  that  helpeth  with  us  and  laboureth "  (i  Cor. 
xvi.  15).  These  words  mdicate  that  there  were  leaders 
in  the  church  who  had  "  addicted  themselves  to  the  minis- 
try of  the  saints,"  but  they  are  not  mentioned  with  an 
official  title,  and  nothing  is  intimated  as  to  their  appoint- 
ment. Rather  the  voluntary  performance  of  certain  duties 
appears  to  have  been  preliminary  to  the  attainment  of  a 
position  which  warrants  the  apostle  in  requiring  others  to 
''submit"  themselves  to  them.  The  Thessalonian  church 
presents  an  analogous  situation  in  the  apostle's  exhortation  : 
"  We  beseech  you,  brethren,  to  know  them  who  labour 
among  you,  and  are  over  you  in  the  Lord,  and  admonish 
you ;  and  to  esteem  them  very  highly  for  their  works' 
sake"  (i  Thess.  v.  12,  13).  Here  "labour  among  you" 
and  "  are  over  you  "  denote  special  and  prominent  activities 
without  any  indication  of  such  a  title  as  "elders"  {irpeo-^v- 
repoi)  or  of  an  "  ordination  "  by  the  apostle  himself.  It  is 
evident  that  similar  conditions  existed  in  Ephesus,  to  which 
Rom.  xvi.  1-20  was  probably  originally  written,  where 
separate  organisations  perhaps  meeting  in  private  houses 
appear  to  be  addressed  and  greeted  through  their  presid- 
ing officers.  In  Rom.  xii.  8,  "he  that  ruleth,  with  diligence" 
doubtless  refers  to  such  a  leading  personage.  Here  the 
position  appears  to  belong  to  one  who  was  supposed  to 
have  the  requisite  "gift,"  and  he  is  mentioned  along  with 
those  who  have  the  gifts  of  prophecy,  ministry,  exhortation, 
teaching,  and  giving,  as  if  each  one  assumed  his  position, 
and  performed  its  appropriate  duties  in  the  interest  of  all 
according  as  he  was  regarded  by  all  to  be  qualified  by 
special  endowment.  The  mention  of  "bishops  and  dea- 
cons "  in  the  address  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians 
doubtless  denotes  a  later  development,  or  the  terms 
eiTLcrKOTTOi  and  SiaKavoL  may  signify  no  more  than  is 
implied  in  "those  who  are  over  you"  (irpolo-Td/jLevoi)  and 


112  THE   MISSIONARY 

** those   who  labour    among  you"  {icoiTLO)VTe<;)  of   i   Thes- 
salonians. 

The  first  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians  was  occasioned  by 
internal  conditions  in  the  church  which  arose  shortly  after 
Paul's  departure  from  Corinth  for  Ephesus,  and  was  writ- 
ten from  the  latter  city,  when  he  was  contemplating  a  visit 
to  them  (i  Cor.  xvi.  2-8).  An  intervening  visit  is  main- 
tained by  some  authorities,  upon  the  discussion  of  whose 
reasons  for  the  contention  we  cannot  here  enter.  He  had 
in  any  event  received  information  as  to  the  situation  from 
various  persons.  Some  dependents  of  *'the  house  of  Chloe  " 
had  told  him  of  ''contentions"  (i  Cor.  i.  ii).  Stephanas, 
Fortunatus,  and  Achaicus  had  visited  him  (i  Cor.  xvi.  17), 
and  Apollos  had  come,  and  was  with  him  when  the  Epistle 
was  written  (i  Cor.  xvi.  12).  A  letter  that  has  not  been 
preserved  he  had  also  written  them,  in  which  he  says 
expressly  that  he  had  charged  them  "  not  to  company  with 
fornicators"  (i  Cor.  v.  9).  He  had  also  had  a  letter  from 
them  to  which  he  refers  with  a  special  indication  of  its 
subject-matter  (i  Cor.  vii.  i).  As  to  the  relation  of 
Apollos  to  the  ''contentions"  which  had  arisen  in  the 
church,  we  have  no  definite  information.  In  mentioning 
the  party  "  of  Apollos  "  Paul  throws  no  blame  upon  him, 
as  if  he  had  endeavoured  to  form  a  faction  opposed  to  him. 
On  the  contrary,  he  speaks  of  him  as  having  "watered" 
where  he  had  "planted"  (i  Cor.  iii.  6).  A  very  natural 
explanation  of  the  situation  is  that  given  in  substantial 
accord  by  Pfleiderer  and  Weizsacker  to  the  effect  that 
Apollos  had  imparted  instruction  of  a  more  philosophical 
character  than  that  of  the  simple  gospel  which  Paul  had 
preached  to  the  Corinthians  as  "babes,"  and  that,  schooled 
as  he  was  in  the  Alexandrian  method  of  interpretation,  he 
had  made  somewhat  hazardous  flights  in  the  regions  of 
allegorising.     That  a  certain  class  of  minds  should  have 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  I13 

been  captivated  by  a  ready  teacher  of  this  sort  is  in  accord- 
ance with  the  nature  of  things,  and  they  may  naturally  be 
assumed  to  have  gone  beyond  their  teacher  to  the  extent 
of  perverting  his  teachings,  and  to  have  grouped  them- 
selves into  a  party  bearing  his  name.  The  letter  which 
the  apostle  had  received  from  the  Corinthian  church  prior 
to  the  writing  of  the  first  Epistle  contained  questions  con- 
cerning marriage,  the  eating  of  flesh  offered  to  idols,  and 
spiritual  gifts,  and  the  indications  point  to  divisions  of 
opinion  on  these  subjects.  His  treatment  of  these  matters, 
so  far  as  it  shows  his  personal  qualities  as  a  man  and  a 
missionary,  has  been  considered  in  a  preceding  chapter, 
and  we  do  not  need  here  to  enter  upon  the  subject. 

The  matter  of  the  party-divisions  is  not  treated  by  the 
apostle  in  such  a  manner  as  to  indicate  that  a  serious 
rupture  had  occurred  which  had  separated  the  church  into 
hostile  camps.  That  the  influence  of  Apollos  had  led 
some  to  declare  themselves  of  his  party  would  naturally 
lead  the  friends  of  the  Pauline  teaching,  or  rather  we 
should  say,  method  (for  there  is  no  reason  for  supposing  a 
radical  difference  of  doctrine)  to  array  themselves  on  the 
side  of  their  first  teacher.  Thus  the  origin  of  these  two 
factions  is  easily  accounted  for.  It  is  not  so  clear  why 
others  should  have  taken  Peter  as  their  party-name,  for 
there  is  no  reason  for  thinking  that  he  had  been  in  Corinth, 
and  nowhere  in  the  Epistle  does  Paul  express  himself  about 
him  as  if  he  were  an  opponent  in  this  field.  His  attitude 
toward  the  question  which  he  discusses  with  so  much 
vehemence  in  Galatians  indicates  that  it  had  not  here 
assumed  such  a  form  as  there.  The  existence  of  a  party 
of  Peter  cannot,  however,  be  denied,  and  the  most  obvious 
explanation  of  the  fact  of  its  existence  is  the  supposition 
that  the  judaisers  had  found  their  way  into  the  church, 
and   were    exerting  an   influence   hostile   to   Paul  and  his 


114  ^-^^  MISSIONARY 

gospel.  The  reference  to  circumcision  in  i  Cor.  vii.  i8 
shows  that  the  question  was  discussed,  although  it  may  not 
have  been  ''the  open  question  of  the  day,"  and  although 
there  is  no  reason  for  concluding  from  what  the  apostle 
says  about  it  that  a  distinct  demand  had  be'en  made  on  the 
part  of  a  Jewish-Christian  party  for  the  subjection  of  the 
gentile  Christians  to  the  rite. 

But  that  the  advocates  of  view^s  distinctively  opposed  to 
those  of  the  apostle  were  on  the  ground  is  indicated  not 
only  by  the  existence  of  the  party  of  Peter,  but  by  pointed 
references  to  them  in  the  second  Epistle  as  the  preachers 
of  "another  Jesus"  and  "false  apostles"  (2  Cor.  xi.  4,  13). 
Since  Peter  was  the  acknowledged  head  among  the  apostles 
in  Jerusalem,  it  is  natural  that  those  of  the  Corinthians 
who  were  favourable  to  the  Jewish-Christian  interpretation 
of  the  gospel  should  call  themselves,  or  be  called,  the  party 
of  Peter.  That  those  who  instigated  this  party  were  not  of 
Corinth,  but  came  with  authorisation,  is  indicated  in  the 
reference  of  Paul  to  "epistles  of  commendation"  which 
were  brought  by  "some"  (2  Cor.  iii.  i).  There  can  be 
little  doubt  that  to  this  party  is  to  be  traced  an  influence 
tending  to  overthrow  the  authority  of  Paul.  Such  an 
influence  was  evidently  exerted.  This  is  an  unavoidable 
inference  from  his  defence  of  himself.  He  speaks  of  being 
"judged  "  by  the  Corinthians,  and  says  it  is  a  small  matter, 
that  of  their  judgment.  He  has  one  who  judges  him,  and 
that  one  is  Christ.  The  admonition  to  judge  nothing 
before  the  time,  until  Christ  came,  is  a  reproof  of  their 
plainly-implied  censure  of  him.  Whether  or  no  Weiz- 
sacker's  opinion  have  sufficient  exegetical  support  to  justify 
it,  that  the  Corinthian  church  proposed  to  call  the  apostle 
to  account,  and  had  appointed  a  time  for  a  hearing,  the 
inference  is  warranted  that  a  party  was  busy  in  opposition 
to  him.     The  question  mooted  may  have  been  his  claim 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  1 15 

to  apostolical  recognition.  In  fact  his  words  show  this 
plainly.  "Am  I  not  an  apostle.?"  he  asks.  "Have  I  not 
seen  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord.?  are  ye  not  my  work  in  the 
Lord.?"  The  opponents,  the  judaisers  who  denied  his 
apostleship,  are  definitely  enough  indicated  in  the  words : 
"  If  I  be  not  an  apostle  unto  others,  yet  doubtless  I  am  to 
you,  for  the  seal  of  my  apostleship  are  ye  in  the  Lord" 
( I  Cor.  ix.  I,  2). 

A  third  party,  that  "of  Christ,"  appears  to  be  denoted 
in  I  Cor.  i.  12,  and  perhaps,  as  Schmiedel  maintains,  one 
cannot  on  strictly  exegetical  grounds  deny  its  existence. 
But  not  without  good  reasons  does  Pfleiderer  argue  that 
the  expression,  "  I  am  of  Christ,"  is  to  be  understood  as 
the  common  cry  of  the  three  other  parties  in  the  sense 
that  "each  made  for  itself  the  chief  or  even  exclusive 
claim  of  belonging  to  Christ  on  the  ground  that  it  con- 
fessed to  faith  in  him  according  to  Paul  or  Apollos  or 
Peter."  In  this  interpretation  he  follows  Robiger  who, 
he  thinks,  has  assigned  the  Christ-party  to  its  proper 
place  —  "the  realm  of  shadows,  of  historical  phantoms" 
{Urchristcjit/uun,  p.  90).  The  passage  presents  exegetical 
difficulties,  but  the  question  in  the  following  verse,  "  Is 
Christ  divided.?"  may  very  well  be  interpreted  in  the  sense. 
Are  there  three  doctrines  which  can  be  called  Christian, 
that  of  Paul,  that  of  Apollos,  and  that  of  Peter .?  Can  you 
all  say  that  you  are  "of  Christ,"  while  you  confess  to  three 
forms  of  Christian  doctrine  .?  Apart,  however,  from  the 
exegetical  question,  it  is  difficult  to  explain  the  existence 
of  such  a  party  beside  the  other  three.  It  is  conceivable 
that  the  adherents  of  the  party  of  Peter  might  claim  that 
the  original  apostles,  having  been  personally  with  Christ, 
were  rather  entitled  to  be  called  Christians  than  Paul  and 
his  supporters,  and  that  such  an  idea  was  current  and 
had  come  to  Paul's  knowledge  appears  from  his  question, 


Il6  THE  MISSIONARY 

"Have  I  not  seen  Christ?"  This  ground  of  the  attack 
of  the  judaisers  upon  Paul's  claims  to  the  apostleship  has 
already  been  referred  to,  and  it  is  difficult  to  discover  a 
basis  for  a  party  of  Christ  in  distinction  from  the  Petrine. 
Besides,  it  is  worthy  of  note  that  apart  from  this  one  pas- 
sage of  difficult  and  doubtful  interpretation  no  reference  is 
made  by  the  apostle  in  the  Epistle  to  this  so-called  Christ- 
party.  On  the  contrary,  when  he  in  another  place  men- 
tions the  subject  of  party-divisions,  he  says  nothing  of  this 
fourth  faction  while  explicitly  naming  the  other  three  :  "  Let 
no  man  glory  in  men ;  for  all  things  are  yours,  whether 
Paul  or  Apollos  or  Cephas  or  the  world  or  life  or  death  or 
things  present  or  things  to  come ;  all  are  yours ;  and  ye 
are  Christ's,  and  Christ  is  God's  "  (i  Cor.  iii.  21,  22).  More- 
over, the  question,  *' Is  Christ  divided.?"  (i  Cor.  i.  13)  is 
appropriate  on  the  supposition  of  the  three  parties,  those 
of  Paul,  Apollos,  and  Peter,  but  has  no  application  to  a 
party  of  Christ.  The  passage  in  2  Cor.  x.  7 :  ''  Do  ye  look 
on  things  after  the  outward  appearance.?  If  any  man  trust 
to  himself  that  he  is  Christ's,  let  him  of  himself  think  this 
again,  that  as  he  is  Christ's,  even  so  are  we  Christ's,"  which 
Weizsacker  adduces  in  support  of  the  theory  of  a  Christ- 
party,  doubtless  relates  to  Paul's  claim  to  apostolical  author- 
ity which  was  disputed  by  the  judaisers,  and  is  accordingly 
adapted  to  the  party  of  Peter.  In  the  next  verse  he  says : 
*'  For  though  I  should  boast  somewhat  more  of  our  author- 
ity." The  sense  is  the  same  if  we  translate  the  first  clause 
of  the  former  verse  with  Schmiedel :  "  Look  upon  what 
lies  before  your  eyes."  To  have  authority  as  an  apostle 
and  to  be  Christ's  are  here  one  and  the  same. 

Before  despatching  the  first  Epistle  Paul  had  sent 
Timothy  to  Corinth,  to  bring  them  into  remembrance  of 
his  ways  which  are  in  Christ,  as  he  taught  everywhere 
in  every  church  (i   Cor.  iv.  17).     He  promises  himself  to 


PBILIPFI,    THESSALONICA,   CORINTH  11/ 

"come  shortly"  to  them,  and  asks  them  whether  he  shall 
come  "with  a  rod  or  m  love  and  in  the  spirit  of  meekness." 
It  appears  that  Timothy's  mission  was  ethical  rather  than 
doctrinal,  for  the  apostle  says :  "  I  beseech  you  be  ye  fol- 
lowers of  me.  For  this  cause  I  have  sent  Timothy,"  etc. 
The  "ways"  into  remembrance  of  which  he  was  to  bring 
them  relate  to  his  walk  and  conversation,  and  the  mission 
denotes  his  solicitude  as  to  the  morals  of  the  church.  To 
this  matter  he  devotes  in  fact  a  section  of  the  first  part 
of  the  Epistle,  which  includes  the  first  six  chapters.  In 
chapters  v.  and  vi.,  namely,  he  addresses  himself  to  the 
moral  shortcomings  of  the  church  in  respect  to  fornica- 
tion of  which  he  had  written  them  in  a  previous  letter,  and 
in  respect  to  going  to  law  with  one  another  before  heathen 
magistrates.  In  the  second  part  of  the  Epistle,  from  chap- 
ter vii.  to  the  end,  which  is  "in  some  sort  a  new  letter," 
he  attends  to  the  questions  addressed  to  him  in  the  letter 
from  the  church  —  marriage,  virgins,  flesh  offered  to  idols, 
women  in  the  church,  the  so-called  "gifts  of  the  Spirit." 
He  returns  to  the  matter  of  his  personal  defence,  his  apos- 
tleship,  inserts  the  hymn  to  love,  treats  of  excesses  in  the 
observance  of  the  Lord's  Supper,  and  finally  discusses  the 
matter  of  the  resurrection  (chap.  xv.).  This  was  a  vital 
question,  and  he  addresses  himself  to  its  discussion  with  a 
manifest  sense  of  its  importance. 

The  feeling,  force,  eloquence,  and  argumentative  skill 
displayed  render  this  chapter  one  of  the  most  noteworthy 
and  masterful  productions  of  the  apostle's  genius.  He 
regards  his  entire  mission  as  standing  or  falling  with  this 
doctrine  of  the  resurrection  of  the  dead.  The  resurrection 
of  Jesus,  which  was  a  central  thought  in  his  teaching,  was 
for  him  an  assurance  of  the  resurrection  of  those  who 
believed  in  him,  and  of  their  entrance  into  his  kingdom 
when  he  should  appear.     Accordingly,  he  argues  that  "  if 


Il8  THE   MISSIONARY 

the  dead  rise  not,  then  is  ..Christ  not  risen;  and  if  Christ 
be  not  risen,  then  is  our  preaching  vain,  and  your  faith  is 
also  vain"  (i  Cor.  xv.  13,  14).  From  the  question  :  "How 
say  some  among  you  that  there  is  no  resurrection  of  the 
dead  ? "  it  is  evident  that  his  argument  was  occasioned  by 
reports  of  the  doubts  of  some  persons  in  the  church  as  to 
the  resurrection,  their  denial  of  it  in  fact.  This  denial 
could  not  have  come  from  Jewish-Christian  believers,  and 
hardly  from  those  who  were  of  the  party  of  Paul.  If  they 
belonged  to  any  one  of  the  parties  it  was  that  of  Apollos, 
though  we  are  not  warranted  in  supposing  that  Apollos 
had  so  taught  them.  The  denial  may  have  arisen  from 
the  revolt  of  gentile-Christian  thought  against  the  super- 
naturalism  of  the  doctrine  of  the  resurrection  (Weizsacker), 
or  from  opposition  to  the  materialism  which  belonged  to 
the  Jewish  doctrine  of  the  bodily  resurrection  (Pfleiderer). 
The  apostle  evidently  endeavoured  to  overcome  the  mate- 
rialistic objection  by  a  spiritual  doctrine,  teaching  that  the 
resurrection-body  is  "incorruptible"  and  "celestial,"  and 
that  "  as  we  have  borne  the  image  of  the  earthy,  we  shall 
also  bear  the  image  of  the  heavenly  "  (i  Cor.  xv.  40-49). 
From  this  Epistle  one  obtains  a  tolerably  good  idea  of 
the  difficulties  which  were  encountered  in  the  attempt  to 
establish  the  pure  morality  of  the  gospel  among  a  people 
accustomed  to  the  laxity  of  the  heathen  mode  of  life.  The 
apostle  and  his  gospel  could  not  have  been  subjected  to  a 
greater  trial  than  just  here  in  this  city  of  license.  A 
strange  Christianity  that  of  the  Corinthian  church  must 
have  been  at  the  time  the  iirst  Epistle  was  written  —  a 
Christianity  of  which  we  can  scarcely  form  a  conception ; 
a  mixture  of  lofty  ideas  dimly  apprehended  with  "the 
weak  and  beggarly  elements  of  the  world,"  of  Jewish  the- 
ology, Pauline  mysticism,  and  the  Alexandrian  speculations 
and  allegorising  of  Apollos,  of  conflicting  notions  as  to  the 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  1 19 

flesh  and  the  Spirit,  continence  and  license,  marriage  and 
ceUbacy,  circumcision  and  uncircumcision,  the  authority 
of  Paul  and  that  of  Jerusalem,  theism  and  polytheism;  a 
conflict  of  old  customs  and  habits  with  new  principles  half 
understood,  of  the  *'  puffed-up  "  spirit  of  self-assertion  and 
dogmatism  with  the  modesty  that  waits  to  be  instructed, 
of  the  sense  of  decorum  with  the  loud  demand  for  the 
unveiled  "  prophesying"  of  the  women,  of  a  sound  feeling 
of  the  fitness  of  things  with  a  heathenish  glee  and  glut- 
tony at  the  Supper  of  the  Lord ;  and  a  babel  of  a  many- 
voiced  speaking  **with  a  tongue,"  which  led  the  looker-on 
to  think  the  church  was  "mad."  The  situation  might  well 
dishearten  as  brave  and  great  a  man  as  *Paul,  not  only  as 
to  local  success,  but  also  as  to  the  entire  future  of  the 
cause  of  Christ.  Who  could  have  foreseen  that  out  of 
such  crudeness  and  elemental  fermentation  could  come  the 
Christendom  of  the  nineteenth  century }  It  needed  the 
courage,  the  hope,  the  divine  patience  of  the  great  apostle, 
the  sure  insight  and  faith  of  a  religious  genius,  who  looks 
upon  *'the  things  that  are  not  seen,"  to  undertake  the 
mighty  task  of  bringing  order  out  of  this  chaos.  Not  by 
violence  and  rough  compulsion  could  the  task  be  achieved, 
but  only  by  the  ideal  and  by  the  love  that  ''  hopeth  all 
things,  endureth  all  things."  He  who  could  at  the  same 
time  assert  authority  and  charm  with  the  spirit  of  Christ 
might  venture.  This  Paul  could  do,  and  he  has  left  us 
the  first  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians  as  an  evidence  of  his 
skill  and  mastery. 

That  the  first  Epistle  did  not,  however,  altogether  pro- 
duce its  intended  effect  is  evident  from  the  second,  if  we 
assume  that  in  its  existing  canonical  form  it  is  the  second. 
The  difficulties  instead  of  being  removed  appear  to  have 
taken  on  a  more  intense  and  aggravated  form.  That 
Timothy  on  his  return  had  reported  the  result  of  the  first 


120  THE  MISSIONARY 

letter  is  probable,  as  well  as  that  he  had  brought  informa- 
tion regarding  the  condition  of  the  church.  In  any  case 
the  situation  seemed  sufficiently  serious  to  require  that 
Paul  should  at  once  carry  out  the  purpose  of  visiting  them, 
of  which  he  makes  mention  in  the  first  Epistle  (i  Cor.  iv. 
21,  xi.  34,  xvi.  5-8).  The  indications  are  that  the  visit, 
suddenly  resolved  upon,  was  short,  and  that  he  soon  re- 
turned to  Ephesus.  The  visit  is  proved  by  references  to 
it  in  the  second  Epistle  which  also  contains  intimations  of 
his  experiences  in  the  course  of  it.  In  2  Cor.  xii.  13,  speak- 
ing of  a  contemplated  visit,  he  says :  *'  Behold,  the  third 
time  I  am  ready  to  come  to  you."  In  xiii.  i,  2  he  writes 
again  of  a  third  proposed  visit,  and  tells  the  believers 
there  that,  just  as  when  he  was  with  them  the  second  time, 
so  now  in  his  absence  he  warns  '*  those  who  have  sinned  " 
that  if  he  comes  again  he  "will  not  spare."  These  words 
cannot  fairly  be  interpreted  as  referring  to  intentions  to 
visit  them  which  were  never  carried  out.  The  words : 
"But  I  determined  this  with  myself  that  I  would  not  come 
to  you  again  in  heaviness  [sadness],  for  if  I  make  you 
sorry,  who  then  is  he  that  maketh  me  glad "  (2  Cor.  ii. 
I,  2),  taken  in  connection  with,  "I  call  God  for  a  record 
upon  my  soul  [to  witness  against  my  soul]  that  to  spare 
you  [out  of  consideration  for  you]  I  have  not  yet  come  to 
Corinth"  (i.  23),  cannot  by  any  fair  interpretation  be  re- 
ferred to  his  first  visit.  They  plainly  indicate  a  second  in 
which  he  had  had  painful  experiences.  Not  only  was 
there,  then,  a  second  visit  with  distressing  accompani- 
ments, but  a  second  letter  following  our  first  and  prior  to 
our  second  canonical  Epistle  is  distinctly  referred  to.  "  I 
wrote  this  same  to  you,"  he  says,  "lest  when  I  come 
I  should  have  sorrow  from  them  of  whom  I  ought  to 
rejoice ;  "  "  For  to  this  end  did  I  write,  that  I  might  know 
the  proof  of  you,  whether  ye  be  obedient  in  all  things" 
(2  Cor.  ii.  3,  9). 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  121 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  this  letter  was  written  after 
the  apostle's  second  visit,  and  had  reference  to  the  humil- 
iating and  grievous  circumstances  which  accompanied  it. 
"  Out  of  much  affliction  and  anguish  of  heart,"  he  says, 
*'I  wrote  unto  you  with  many  tears"  (2  Cor.  ii.  4).  Just 
as  he  intimates  that  this  visit  had  been  a  sorrowful  one,  so 
he  says  of  the  letter  that  follows  it :  "  For  though  I  made 
you  sorry  with  a  letter,  I  do  not  repent,  though  I  did 
repent,  for  I  perceive  that  the  same  epistle  hath  made  you 
sorry,  though  it  were  but  for  a  season  "  (2  Cor.  vii.  8). 
These  words  cannot  be  referred  to  our  first  canonical 
Epistle,  and  no  more  characterise  its  general  tone  than 
what  he  says  about  his  second  visit  describes  his  first  mis- 
sion. It  appears,  then,  that  four  letters  were  written  by 
Paul  to  the  Corinthians:  i.  The  one  preceding  our  first 
canonical  Epistle  (i  Cor.  v.  9);  2.  Our  first  canonical 
Epistle;  3.  An  intervening  one  between  our  two  canonical 
Epistles ;  4.  Our  second  canonical  Epistle,  unless  the 
second  part  of  this,  x.  i-xiii.  10,  was  No.  3.  Between  our 
two  canonical  Epistles  was  a  visit  of  Titus  to  the  church, 
who  was  doubtless  sent  by  the  apostle  with  reference  to 
the  painful  incidents  connected  with  the  latter's  second 
visit,  and  who  brought  him  a  report  in  Macedonia  whither 
he  had  come  from  Ephesus  (2  Cor.  vii.  6,  13).  It  is  not 
improbable  that  he  was  the  bearer  of  letter  No.  3.  He 
could  hardly  have  been  sent  in  any  case  without  a  writing 
from  the  apostle.  On  his  relations  with  the  church,  see 
2  Cor.  vii.  7,  viii.  6,  16. 

The  first  part  of  our  second  Epistle  doubtless  contains 
references  to  the  situation  which  occasioned  the  apostle's 
second  visit  to  Corinth,  and  with  which  the  letter  that 
followed  it  dealt.  He  speaks  of  a  man  who  had  "  caused 
grief,"  and  been  punished  "of  many,"  that  is,  probably, 
by  the  majority  of   the  church.     Now  he  should  be  for- 


122  THE   MISSIONARY 

given,  and  Paul  himself  is  ready  to  forgive  (2  Cor.  ii.  5-10). 
Again  in  another  place  he  relates  how  Titus  had  told  him 
of  the  *' mourning  "  of  the  church  and  writes  of  his  hav- 
ing made  them  ** sorry  with  a  letter,"  of  their  "repentance," 
of  their  ''clearing"  of  themselves,  their  "indignation,  zeal, 
revenge,"  and  says  that  the  letter  in  question  was  written 
neither  on  account  of  him  who  did  the  wrong,  nor  on  ac- 
count of  him  who  was  wronged,  but  that  his  care  for  the 
church  might  be  apparent  (2  Cor.  vii.  8-12).  The  refer- 
ence of  this  to  the  case  of  the  incestuous  person  (i  Cor. 
V.  1-5)  is  hardly  satisfactory.  The  punishment  which 
Paul  had  determined  on  for  him  was  nothing  less  than  his 
delivery  to  Satan  for  the  destruction  of  his  flesh,  and  we 
should  not  without  good  reason  assume  the  apostle  to 
have  so  far  changed  his  attitude  and  purpose  as  to  be 
ready  to  forgive  him ;  and  there  appears  to  be  no  other 
reason  for  this  explanation  than  the  interpretation  of  the 
second  Epistle  out  of  the  first. 

The  indications  which  we  have  rather  point  to  an  occur- 
rence on  Paul's  second  visit  in  which  he  had  been  grossly 
maltreated  by  some  one,  and  are  moreover  to  the  effect 
that  the  church  supported  this  person,  and  had  afterward 
perhaps  under  the  influence  of  the  apostle's  second  letter 
"repented,"  and  shown  "their  indignation"  against  the 
offender.  Those  who  favour  the  hypothesis  already  re- 
ferred to  that  it  was  proposed  by  some  of  the  apostle's 
enemies  in  Corinth  to  put  him  on  trial,  think  that  the 
plan  was  carried  out  on  his  second  visit,  and  that  in  the 
course  of  the  proceedings  the  apostle  was  deeply  offended, 
"  wronged "  by  some  one.  In  any  case  the  references 
to  the  matter  in  second  Corinthians  indicate  a  personal 
offence  against  him,  which  he  was  ready  to  forgive  after 
the  punishment  inflicted  "of  many"  (2  Cor.  ii.  6).  It  is 
not    improbable    that    the  second  letter,   which   doubtless 


PIIILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  123 

dealt  with  this  matter,  gave  rise  to  the  remark  to  which 
he  refers  that  ''his  letters  indeed  are  weighty  and  power- 
ful, but  his  bodily  presence  is  weak"  (2  Cor.  x.  10).  To 
what  extent  the  opposition  and  maltreatment  were  repre- 
sented by  the  Jewish-Christian  party  we  are  unable  to 
say.  The  indications  in  the  second  Epistle  are  not  pre- 
cise enough  to  warrant  any  positive  conclusions  regarding 
the  matter,  but  the  definite  reference  to  a  second  visit  and 
a  second  letter  render  its  explanation  in  connection  with 
these  highly  probable. 

That  between  the  waiting  of  our  first  and  second 
canonical  Epistles  the  opposition  to  the  apostle  on  the 
part  of  the  judaisers  was  largely  developed  and  much 
intensified  is  evident  from  the  tone  of  2  Cor.  x-xiii.,  the 
second  division  of  the  letter.  There  is  a  reference  to 
them  in  the  first  part  where  he  asks:  *'Do  we  need,  as 
some  others,  epistles  of  commendation  to  you  .''"  and  per- 
haps in  the  words  :  ''  But  if  our  gospel  be  hid,  it  is  hid  to 
them  that  are  lost  "  (2  Cor.  iii.  i,  iv.  3).  It  is  difficult  to 
determine  to  what  extent  this  portion  of  the  Epistle  is 
addressed  to  an  opposing  party  in  the  church  ;  probably 
that  ''of  Peter"  instead  of  that  "of  Christ,"  but  the 
apostle  seems  to  have  had  them  in  view,  while  his  invec- 
tive is  directed  against  intruders  of  the  Jewish-Christian 
propaganda  who  doubtless  were  known  by  him  to  have 
sympathisers  among  the  believers.  They  appear  to  have 
charged  that  he  was  no  real  apostle,  that  with  his  bold 
letters  and  contemptible  personal  presence  he  was  not 
worthy  of  consideration,  that  there  was  nothing  to  be 
feared  from  him,  and  that  a  man  was  of  small  account 
who  went  about  workins;  at  a  wretched  handicraft  for  his 
support.  He  retorts  upon  them  with  a  fine  irony,  and 
says  that  he  will  not  make  himself  "of  the  number  of 
those  who   commend  themselves,"   and   "measure   them- 


124  THE  MISSIONARY 

selves  by  themselves."  The  charge  is  plainly  implied  that 
these  judaisers  have  come  into  his  field  and  "boast  of 
other  men's  labours,"  and  he  says  that  he  proposes  to 
preach  the  gospel  in  regions  beyond  Corinth,  and  not  to 
"boast  in  another  man's  line  of  things  made  ready  to  his 
hand"  (2  Cor.  x.  15-18).  The  self-commendation  of  his 
opponents  is  not  to  be  accepted.  The  one  commended  by 
the  Lord  (Christ)  has  alone  the  true  commendation.  He 
is  apprehensive  lest  the  false  teachers  "corrupt"  the 
minds  of  the  believers  "from  the  simplicity  that  is  in 
Christ,"  just  as  the  serpent  beguiled  Eve  (xi.  3).*  Against 
the  charge  that  he  was  "  rude  in  speech "  he  sets  the 
assertion  that  he  is  not  deficient  "  in  knowledge,"  and  in 
order  to  "cut  off  occasion  from  them  who  desire  occasion  " 
he  defends  himself  against  the  "offence"  which  his  oppo- 
nents found  in  his  working  with  his  hands  to  support  him- 
self (xi.  7-12).  Then  in  the  climax  of  his  invective  he 
charges  "the  false  apostles,"  who  "transform  themselves 
into  ministers  of  Christ,"  with  being  ministers  of  Satan, 
"transformed    as    the    ministers    of    righteousness"    (xi. 

I3-I5>t 

*  The  comparison  is  appropriate  only  in  the  sense  that  Eve  was  through  the 
serpent  (identified  with  Satan,  verse  14,  Rom.  xvi.  20)  made  unfaithful  to  her 
husband,  as  the  Corinthians  are  in  danger  of  being  made  unfaithful  to  Christ, 
to  whom  they  are  ''espoused"  (verse  2).  Paul  may  have  had  in  mind  the 
Jewish  tradition  that  Satan  or  his  angel  seduced  Eve  to  commit  adultery. 
How  early  this  tradition  was  current  we  do  not  know,  but  Irenseus  was  ac- 
quainted with  it  among  the  Ophites.  Paul's  implied  reference  to  it  here 
would  be  doubtful  if  he  always  kept  to  the  Bible  in  his  illustrations,  as  we 
have  seen  that  he  did  not.  See  Everling,  Die  paid.  Angel,  n.  DiiDionoL, 
p.  51  ff.,  and  Schmiedel  on  the  passage. 

t  Dr.  McGiffert  makes  a  discrimination  between  judaisers  and  judaisers,  and 
thinks  that  those  who  worked  against  the  apostle  in  Corinth  are  to  be  distin- 
guished from  his  opponents  in  Galatia  and  Antioch,  for  the  reason  that  in  the 
Corinthian  Epistles  Paul  does  not  openly  "expose  their  purpose"  (p.  315). 
But  the  strong  terms  which  he  employs  in  2  Corinthians  in  denunciation  of 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  1 25 

The  tone  and  contents  of  the  section  of  our  canonical 
second  Epistle  included  in  x.  i-xiii.  10  furnishes  consider- 
able support  to  the  hypothesis  that  we  have  here  the  prin- 
cipal part  (the  introduction  being  absent)  of  the  letter 
referred  to  in  2  Cor.  ii.  4,  vii.  8,  the  next  letter  following 
our  first  Epistle  or  No.  3  of  the  whole  series  of  four  letters 
written  to  the  Corinthians.  The  difference  between  this 
section  and  the  preceding  portion  is  so  marked  in  the  atti- 
tude and  feeling  of  the  apostle  toward  the  church  as  to 
render  the  supposition  extremely  improbable  that  he  could 
have  expressed  himself  in  such  a  way  in  one  and  the  same 
letter.  In  v.  12  he  says  he  does  not  commend  himself 
again  to  the  church,  but  gives  them  occasion  to  glory  on 
his  behalf,  so  that  glorying  in  him  they  may  answer  those 
who  glory  only  in  appearance,  that  is,  the  judaisers  ;  while 
in  the  second  part  (xii.  11)  he  says  he  is  ''compelled"  by 
their  attitude  toward  him  to  "become  a  fool  in  glorying." 
The  entire  submission  of  the  Corinthians  to  his  require- 
ments, so  that  he  is  ''filled  with  comfort,"  and  repents  of 
the  severity  with  which  he  had  written  them,  since  they 
have  "cleared  themselves"  by  their  compliance  is  ac- 
knowledged in  vii.  4-15  ;  while  in  xii.  20,  21  he  fears  that 
when  he  comes  he  will  not  find  them  such  as  he  would, 
and  will  be  "  humbled  "  among  them  on  account  of  their 
"envyings,"  "wraths,"  etc.,  against  which  he  will  be 
obliged  to  proceed  with   such  severity  that  they  will  find 

them  appear  to  indicate  that  he  had  no  less  persons  than  his  old  enemies  in 
mind.  Besides,  what  is  more  likely  than  that  the  judaisers  with  "  letters  of 
commendation "  probably  from  the  Jerusalem  authorities,  should  in  Corinth 
have  charged  that  Paul  was  no  real  apostle,  while  asserting  that  their  sponsors 
were  the  only  true  apostles,  since  they  had  been  with  Jesus  ?  The  fact  that 
Paul,  as  Dr.  McGiffert  says,  "  defends  his  apostolic  character  "  in  opposition  to 
them  denotes  what  sort  of  enemies  they  were,  and  what  was  the  nature  of  their 
antagonism.  A  Jewish-Christian  contention  apart  from  the  question  of  the 
Jewish  rites  is  hardly  supposable. 


126  THE   MISSIONARY 

him  as  they  would  not.  The  supposition  that  this  section 
is  substantially  the  letter  written  after  his  second  visit 
to  the  church,  and  that  the  preceding  portion  (i.-ix.)  was 
written  later,  that  is,  after  he  had  received  favourable  news 
from  them,  has  been  supported  by  a  considerable  number 
of  authorities,  and  most  recently  by  SchmiedeL* 

Our  two  canonical  Epistles  to  the  Corinthians  are 
among  the  most  important  of  the  existing  writings  of  the 
apostle,  especially  in  what  they  show  of  his  character  and 
of  his  dealing  with  the  most  trying  and  critical  emergen- 
cies arising  from  the  contact  of  Christianity  with  heathen- 
ism. They  are  also  of  no  small  doctrinal  importance, 
although  the  circumstances  and  the  readers  did  not  require 
such  an  expounding  of  his  opinions  on  the  law  and  the 
atonement  as  we  find  in  Romans.  For  his  doctrine  of 
Christ  and  of  the  last  things  they  furnish  an  abundant 
material,  and  of  his  ethics  we  learn  more  from  them  than 
from  any  other  source,  particularly  as  to  marriage  and 
divorce,  the  relations  of  the  sexes,  and  social  purity.  We 
learn  here  more  than  anywhere  else  of  his  physical  and 
mental  condition,  of  his  "visions  and  revelations,"  of  his 
seeing  of  the  Lord,  of  the  place  that  he  would  assign  to 
women  in  the  Christian  community,  of  his  attitude  toward 
idolatry,  and  of  his  dealing  with  the  matter  of  the  "gifts 
of  the  Spirit."  Not  a  little  do  we  find  in  them  too  of  his 
method  of  interpretation,  and  of  his  style  as  a  writer  they 
furnish  a  striking  example.  The  spiritual  apprehension  of 
the  resurrection  is  expounded  in  detail  and  with  graphic 
power.  The  great  missionary  here  openly  confesses  him- 
self to  those  whom  he  loved  and  for  whom  he  suffered. 
In  his  timidity,  his  hesitation  before  his  great  task,  his 
humiliation  at  the  hands  of  his  enemies,  his  outbursts  of 

*  Dr.  McGiffert  must  now  be  reckoned  among  the  supporters  of  this 
hypothesis  {Ilie  Apostolic  Age,  p.  313). 


PHILIPPI,    THESSALONICA,    CORINTH  12/ 

indignation,  his  irony  and  scorn,  his  devotion  to  his  spirit- 
ual children,  his  wrestling  with  himself,  his  anguish,  and 
his  tears,  he  stands  before  us  in  unveiled  exposure.  The 
Epistles  are,  moreover,  of  great  value  on  account  of  the 
vivid  picture  which  they  present  of  the  fortunes  of  primi- 
tive Christianity  in  its  ethical  and  religious  relations  with 
modes  of  life  so  foreign  to  its  principles  and  spirit  as  those 
that  prevailed  in  Corinth.  Not  less  important,  too,  are 
they  than  Galatians  in  what  they  show  of  the  attitude  and 
methods  of  Paul's  unwearied  opponents,  the  judaisers; 
and  if  in  his  opposition  to  them  he  expresses  himself  with 
more  bitterness  and  severity  than  we  can  approve,  we  shall 
do  well  to  remember  that  he  was  human,  that  the  cause 
of  his  life  was  at  stake,  and  that  in  the  classic  hymn  to 
love  is  revealed  the  deep  and  permanent  mood  of  his 
spirit  —  a  mood  without  which  his  success  would  have 
been  impossible. 


CHAPTER   VI 

EPHESUS  — ROME 

PASSING  in  our  study  of  Paul's  missionary  work  from 
Corinth  to  Ephesus  is  like  going  out  of  light  into 
darkness.  The  vividness  with  which  the  Corinthian 
Epistles  delineate  the  relations  of  the  apostle  to  the 
church,  and  the  bold  relief  into  which  they  throw  his  per- 
sonality, invest  these  writings  with  an  interest  that  makes 
the  meagreness  of  the  information  concerning  the  mission 
in  Asia  the  more  keenly  felt.  Of  his  work  here  during 
nearly  three  years  we  have  only  the  most  unsatisfactory 
intimations.  In  first  Corinthians  he  says  he  will  "tarry 
at  Ephesus  until  Pentecost"  (i  Cor.  xvi.  8).  We  have 
seen  that  after  this  letter  was  written  he  made  a  second 
journey  to  Corinth,  whence  he  doubtless  returned  to 
Ephesus.  In  second  Corinthians  which  was  written  in 
Macedonia  after  he  had  left  Ephesus  he  says:  ''For  we 
would  not  have  you  ignorant,  brethren,  of  our  trouble 
which  came  to  us  in  Asia,  that  we  were  pressed  out  of 
measure,  above  strength,  insomuch  that  we  despaired  even 
of  life"  (2  Cor.  i.  8).  How  extensive  a  missionary  work  is 
implied  in  ''the  churches  of  Asia  salute  you"  (i  Cor.  xvi. 
19)  we  do  not  know.  The  so-called  Epistle  to  the  Ephe- 
sians  affords  no  information  as  to  Paul's  relations  with  the 
ctiurch  in  Ephesus.  This  fact  is  in  itself  unfavourable  to 
its  genuineness.  That  after  his  extended  labours  there 
and  the  perils  to  which  he  was  exposed,  he  should  have 
written  as  long  a  letter  as  this  without  the  personal  remi- 
niscences   in   which    his   Epistles    addressed    to    churches 

128 


EPHES  US—R  OME  1 2  9 

which  he  had  founded  abound  is  highly  improbable.  The 
deviations  apparent  in  it  from  the  style  and  thought  of  his 
unquestionably  genuine  writings  throw  doubt  upon  it  from 
another  source.  It  is,  moreover,  doubtful  whether  it  was 
addressed  to  the  Ephesian  church,  for  according  to  the 
conclusions  of  textual  criticism  the  words  *'in  Ephesus"  in 
the  first  verse  ''  were  either  originally  not  there  at  all,  or 
were  very  early  stricken  out,"  from  which  circumstance 
the  conclusion  is  drawn  that  ''the  Epistle  was  indeed 
accepted,  but  was  not  regarded  as  directed  to  Ephesus."* 
All  the  later  indications  go  to  show  that  the  apostle's  work 
in  Ephesus  left  no  permanent  results.  The  words  which 
the  writer  of  Acts  puts  into  his  mouth  when  on  the  last 
journey  to  Jerusalem  he  avoided  Ephesus  and  addressed 
"the  Elders"  of  the  church  at  Miletus,  having  sent  for 
them  to  come  to  him  there  :  *' And  of  your  own  selves  shall 
men  arise  speaking  perverse  things  to  draw  away  disciples 
after  them,"  are  probably  a  prophecy  after  the  event  (Acts 
XX.  30).  The  author  of  second  Timothy  represents  that 
"all  they  who  are  in  Asia  are  turned  away  from"  the 
apostle  (2  Tim.  i.  15).  The  strange  occurrence  of  numerous 
greetings  in  the  last  chapter  of  Romans,  an  Epistle  ad- 
dressed to  a  church  which  the  apostle  had  never  visited, 
and  where  he  could  hardly  have  had  twenty-five  or  thirty 
personal  friends,  has  led,  as  has  before  been  remarked,  to 
the  supposition  that  this  portion  of  that  letter  (xvi.  1-20) 
was  addressed  to  the  Ephesian  believers. 

If  this  supposition  be  correct,  we  know  that  the  church 
of  Ephesus  was  in  existence  at  least  until  toward  the  end 
of  Paul's  work.  The  fragment  is  a  recommendation  of 
Phebe  of  Cenchrea,  the  harbour  of  Corinth,  and  the  refer- 
ences to  the  various  persons  are  such  as  only  one  could 

*  For  a  discussion  of  the   Epistle  in   detail   the  reader  is  referred  to  the 
author's  volume  in  the  International  Handbooks  to  the  New  Testament. 


I30  THE  MISSIONARY 

make  who  knew  not  only  them  but  also  their  situation, 
their  households,  etc.,  and  had  had  personal  relations  with 
them.  Rome  being  excluded,  the  most  probable  address 
of  this  letter  of  commendation  is  Ephesus.  The  mention 
of  Epsenetus  as  the  first  fruits  of  Asia  (not  Achaia)  favours 
this  supposition,  as  does  also  that  of  Prisca  and  Aquila, 
who  are  represented  as  here  in  i  Cor.  xvi.  19,  and  as 
having  a  church  in  their  house  in  Ephesus.  Whether  this 
was  originally  the  conclusion  of  a  letter  to  the  Ephesians 
or  a  complete  writing  intended  according  to  the  first  verse 
to  commend  Phebe  to  the  various  persons  mentioned  we 
can  only  conjecture.  The  latter  supposition  is  not  at  all 
improbable.  How  the  letter  came  to  be  connected  with 
Romans  we  cannot  tell.  It  has  been  conjectured  that 
Phebe  was  the  bearer  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  as  well 
as  of  the  short  letter  of  commendation  to  friends  of  the 
apostle  in  Ephesus,  and  that  she  went  from  the  latter  city 
to  Rome.  The  verses  21-24,  whose  position  is  variously 
given  in  different  MSS.,  are  believed  by  some  authorities 
to  have  been  the  concluding  greeting  to  the  Romans.  If 
they  were  written  by  a  transcriber  on  a  sheet  on  the  other 
side  of  which  was  Phebe's  letter  to  Ephesus,  the  incorpo- 
ration of  the  latter  with  Romans  is  not  strange  in  the 
course  of  copying  (so  Lipsius).  These  conjectures  arise 
out  of  the  improbability  already  mentioned  that  Paul  should 
have  sent  these  greetings  to  Rome,  and  proceed  upon 
the  supposition  that  both  letters  were  written  from  the 
same  place  (Corinth)  by  the  same  hand.  The  concluding 
verses  of  the  chapter  (25-27)  are  of  doubtful  genuineness. 
The  different  concluding  formulas  of  the  Epistle  (xv.  33, 
xvi.  20,  24)  show  that  in  the  process  of  transcribing  the  end 
of  the  letter  was  early  confused  ;  and  the  insertion  of  the 
greetings  doubtless  contributed  to  this  result. 

That  the  apostle  was  exposed  to  some  great  peril  while 


EPHES  US—R  OME  1 3 1 

in  Ephesus  we  have  seen  from  the  passage  2  Cor.  i.  8. 
In  the  letter  of  commendation  (Rom.  xvi.  4)  he  says  of 
Prisca  and  Aquila  that  they  have  for  his  life  ''laid  down 
their  own  necks,"  that  is,  probably,  exposed  themselves  to 
great  danger  in  order  to  save  him.  Again  in  i  Cor.  xv.  32 
he  says  :  "  If  after  the  manner  of  men  I  have  fought  with 
beasts  at  Ephesus,  what  profiteth  it  me  if  the  dead  rise 
not }  Let  us  eat  and  drink,  for  to-morrow  we  die."  These 
are  all  vague  allusions,  and  we  cannot  be  certain  that  they 
relate  to  one  and  the  same  event.  The  last  is  the  most 
definite,  and  yet  expositors  do  not  agree  as  to  its  inter- 
pretation. If  there  was  an  actual  contest  with  beasts  in 
the  arena,  which  could  be  possible  only  if  he  were  con- 
demned by  the  authorities  of  the  city  on  some  grave  charge, 
it  is  in  the  first  place  improbable  that  he  would  have  come 
out  of  it  alive,  and  in  the  second  place,  exceedingly  strange 
that  he  should  not  have  mentioned  the  peril  in  2  Cor.  xi. 
23-27.  Notwithstanding  these  objections,  Holsten  and 
Weizsacker  maintain  the  literal  interpretation  of  the  passage, 
the  latter  expressing  himself  with  rather  more  positiveness 
than  the  circumstances  warrant.  If  Paul  was  a  Roman 
citizen  (Acts  xvi.  37,  xxii.  25),  he  could  not,  even  if  con- 
demned to  death,  have  been  so  executed  by  the  Ephesian 
authorities.  A  difficulty  in  the  way  of  a  figurative  inter- 
pretation of  the  passage  lies  in  the  word  employed  for 
"  fought  with  beasts "  {kOripLoyud'^iqcTe)  which  according  to 
usage  denoted  a  contest  with  beasts  in  the  arena,  and  was 
not  applicable  to  an  encounter  with  them  in  case  of  meet- 
ing them  on  a  journey.  This  difficulty  Krenkel  seeks  to 
overcome  by  supposing  that  there  was  a  sort  of  secret 
language  among  the  Christians  in  which  *'wild  beast" 
(OrjpLov)  signified  the  Roman  power  according  to  the  cur- 
rent interpretation  of  the  four  beasts  in  Daniel  ii.  and  vii. 
Whether   this  view    be  tenable   or   no,    the    objections 


132  THE   MISSIONARY 

against  the  literal  rendering  can  hardly  be  overcome,  and 
we  must  be  content  with  the  only  fact  that  stands  indu- 
bitable, namely,  that  in  Ephesus  the  apostle  was  exposed 
to  a  mortal  peril.  We  may  also  assume  that  the  Corinthian 
Christians  knew  enough  of  it  to  enable  them  to  understand 
and  correctly  interpret  the  expression  "fought  with  beasts." 
Weizsacker's  conjecture  that  a  fighting  with  beasts  in  the 
arena  drew  public  attention  to  the  apostle,  and  was  thus 
the  occasion  of  the  opportunity  referred  to  in  i  Cor.  xvi.  9: 
''A  great  door  and  effectual  is  opened  unto  me,"  is  not 
supported  by  any  hint  in  the  Epistles,  and  certainly  not  in 
Acts,  where  the  episode  is  not  mentioned.  In  2  Cor.  i. 
8-1 1  the  apostle  refers  after  he  had  left  Ephesus  to  a 
''trouble  which  came  to  him  in  Asia,"  in  which  he  was 
"pressed  out  of  measure,  above  strength,"  insomuch  that 
he  "despaired  even  of  life."  The  time  of  his  writing  of 
this  was  far  enough  from  that  of  the  reference  in  i  Cor. 
XV.  32  to  exclude  the  probability  that  he  had  the  same 
peril  in  mind.  Yet  what  this  second  danger  was  is  uncer- 
tain. It  may  have  come  from  a  renewal  of  the  persecu- 
tions, or  it  may  have  been  a  dangerous  illness  (see  2  Cor. 
iv.  10;  Gal.  vi.  17;  Phil.  iii.  10).  In  any  case,  the  deliv- 
erance was  as  from  death. 

We  learn  little  more  of  the  Ephesian  church  and  of 
Paul's  relation  to  it  from  any  source.  The  information 
furnished  in  Acts  is  unsatisfactory  even  if  trustworthy. 
As  usual  this  book  tells  us  nothing  of  the  inner  history  of 
the  church,  and  nothing  that  covers  the  indications  of 
perils  to  which  the  apostle  himself  makes  reference.  The 
affair  with  the  silversmith,  Demetrius,  may  have  an  his- 
torical basis  (Acts  xix.  23-41),  but  the  situation  of  the 
apostle  in  this  difficulty  is  not  represented  as  excessively 
perilous.  He  is  surrounded  with  the  protection  of  "certain 
of  the  chief  of  Asia,"  or  at  least  is  saved  from  going  into 


EPHES  US  —  R  OME  1 3  3 

danger  by  their  counsel.  An  officer  of  the  city  addresses 
the  crowd,  and  the  matter  ends  in  the  confusion  and  failure 
of  those  who  wished  to  harm  him  and  his  companions. 
There  is  nothing  here  that  corresponds  to  the  critical 
situation  which  Paul  characterises  as  a  fight  with  beasts. 
We  learn  nothing  from  Acts,  moreover,  of  the  circum- 
stances under  which  Prisca  and  Aquila  for  the  apostle's 
life  ^'laid  down  their  own  necks,"  nor  do  we  find  an  inti- 
mation of  a  situation  in  which  these  friends  exposed  them- 
selves for  him,  or  Andronicus  and  Junias  became  his 
''fellow-prisoners"  (Rom.  xvi.  7).  The  salutations  in 
Phebe's  letter  (Rom.  xvi.  3-16)  throw  little  light  on  the 
affairs  of  the  church  in  Ephesus.  We  learn  from  the 
names  and  from  the  designation  "kinsmen"  that  several 
of  the  persons  were  of  Jewish  descent.  Two  of  these, 
Andronicus  and  Junias,  he  calls  ''apostles"  (verse  7),  a 
use  probably  of  the  word  in  the  wider  sense  (Acts  xiv.  14), 
and  says  of  them  that  they  were  "in  Christ"  before  him. 
They  were  evidently  Christian  missionaries  temporarily 
located  in  Ephesus.  Then  there  are  the  "  kinsmen " 
Herodion  (verse  11)  and  Mariam  (verse  6)  and  of  course 
Prisca  and  Aquila.  Among  those  greeted  we  find  espe- 
cially mentioned  certain  persons  as  "  helpers,"  as  those  who 
"labour  in  the  Lord,"  "laboured  much  in  the  Lord,"  etc., 
a  designation  very  likely  denoting  such  prominent  positions 
in  several  little  communities,  perhaps  meeting  in  private 
houses,  as  that  assigned  to  Stephanas  in  i  Cor.  xvi.  15. 
These  labourers  in  Christ  may  also  have  been  helpers  of 
the  apostle  in  missionary  work.  If  in  verse  6  we  adopt 
a  well-authenticated  reading  {eh  vfia^)  the  woman  here 
mentioned  is  designated  as  one  who  bestowed  much  labour 
on  the  church  instead  of  on  the  apostle.  We  learn  from 
greetings  sent  to  persons  of  certain  households  that  there 
were  some  slaves  among  the  converts.     Every  one  inter- 


134  THE   MISSIONARY 

ested  in  following  the  apostle's  work  will  regret  that  so 
great  an  obscurity  hangs  over  the  scene  of  a  labour  long 
continued  and  full  of  perils. 

We  have  arrived  at  the  end  of  Paul's  distinctive  mission- 
ary work  as  the  apostle  to  the  gentiles ;  and.  yet  we  are 
not  at  the  end  of  his  mission,  for  he  appears  in  another 
relation  as  a  missionary  to  the  Jewish  Christians.  He 
never  forgot  the  compact  made  in  the  conference  at  Jeru- 
salem that  he  would  ** remember  the  poor"  (Gal.  ii.  lo); 
and  it  is  an  evidence  of  his  magnanimity  that,  although  he 
was  harassed  and  crippled  in  his  gentile  mission  in  Galatia 
and  Corinth  by  Jewish-Christian  emissaries,  who  sowed 
discord  and  threatened  to  destroy  his  work  by  undermining 
his  influence,  he  never  abandoned  the  purpose  of  a  collec- 
tion for  the  needy  Christians  in  Jerusalem,  but  carried  it 
out,  not  as  a  matter  of  contract,  but  as  a  privilege.  His 
frequent  references  to  the  matter  show  how  near  it  lay  to 
his  heart.  In  Rom.  xv.  26,  27  he  says  :  *'  For  it  hath 
pleased  them  of  Macedonia  and  Achaia  to  make  a  certain 
contribution  to  the  poor  saints  who  are  at  Jerusalem.  It 
hath  pleased  them  verily,  and  their  debtors  they  are.  For 
if  the  gentiles  have  been  made  partakers  of  their  spiritual 
things,  their  duty  is  also  to  minister  to  them  in  carnal 
things."  We  may  infer  that  in  this  characteristic  style  he 
urged  the  collection  upon  his  churches  as  a  **duty."  He 
also  urges  it  upon  the  ground  that  it  will  not  only  ''supply 
the  want  of  the  saints,"  but  will  likewise  be  "  abundant  by 
many  thanksgivings  unto  God"  (2  Cor.  ix.  12),  that  is, 
will  cause  thankfulness  to  God  to  abound  in  the  recipients, 
and  will  accordingly  have  a  religious  result.  From  Ephesus 
he  writes  to  the  Corinthians  that  he  has  "given  order  to 
the  churches  of  Galatia "  concerning  the  collection,  and 
exhorts  the  believers  in  Corinth  that  "upon  the  first  day 
of  the  week  every  one  lay  by  him  in  store,  as  God  hath 


EPHES  US—K  OME  1 3  5 

prospered  him,"  that  all  may  be  in  readiness  when  he 
comes.  His  purpose  at  this  time  appears  to  have  been  to 
send  from  each  church  to  Jerusalem  as  the  bearer  of  the 
gift  some  one  "approved  by  letters,"  instead  of  going 
himself  (i  Cor.  xvi.  1-3).  Later  he  writes  them  of  "the 
grace  of  God  bestowed  on  the  churches  of  Macedonia,  how 
that  in  a  great  trial  of  affliction  the  abundance  of  their  joy 
and  their  deep  poverty  abounded  unto  the  riches  of  their 
liberality"  (2  Cor.  viii.  i,  2),  and  urges  the  Corinthians 
that  they,  according  to  their  previous  "readiness  to  will," 
now  show  "a  performance  also  out  of  that  which  they 
have  "  (verse  11). 

It  must  have  been  with  no  little  hesitation  that  Paul 
finally  himself  undertook  to  go  to  Jerusalem  as  the  bearer 
of  the  collection.  He  must  in  so  doing  put  himself  into 
the  hands  of  the  men  who  "  both  killed  the  Lord  Jesus 
and  their  own  prophets,"  and  had  "persecuted"  him, 
"forbidding  him  to  speak  to  the  gentiles  that  they  might 
be  saved,  to  fill  up  their  sins  always;  for  the  wrath  is  come 
upon  them  to  the  uttermost"  (i  Thess.  ii.  15,  16).  The 
we-source  of  Acts  represents  that  at  Tyre  certain  disciples 
said  to  Paul  "through  the  Spirit  that  he  should  not  go  up 
to  Jerusalem  "  (Acts  xxi.  4),  and  in  Caesarea  the  prophet 
Agabus  foretold  as  the  word  of  "the  Holy  Ghost"  that  if 
he  went  he  would  be  "delivered  into  the  hands  of  the 
gentiles  "  (verse  1 1).  The  former  statement  must  be  taken 
with  some  allowance,  for  the  apostle  was  not  accustomed 
to  disregard  the  express  commandments  of  "the  Spirit." 
At  any  rate,  neither  warnings  nor  entreaties  could  shake 
his  resolution.  He  was  "  ready  not  to  be  bound  only,  but 
also  to  die  at  Jerusalem  for  the  name  of  the  Lord  Jesus  " 
(verse  13). 

According  to  Acts  the  "  brethren "  in  Jerusalem,  the 
Jewish-Christian    believers,   "James  and    all    the    elders," 


136  THE   MISSIONARY 

received  Paul  ''gladly,"  but  counselled  him,  in  order  to 
appease  the  multitude  of  believing  Jews  "all  zealous  of  the 
law,"  to  perform  a  Jewish  rite  so  as  to  show  that  he  "  walked 
orderly,  and  kept  the  law."  That  he  should  have  taken 
steps  to  do  this,  as  Acts  represents,  is  simply  incredible 
(Acts  xxi.  17-24).*  The  writer  of  Acts  is  more  interested 
in  representing  Paul  as  ready  to  sacrifice  his  principles  to 
please  the  Jewish  brethren  than  he  is  to  report  the  real 
object  of  the  apostle's  mission  to  Jerusalem.  He  makes 
no  mention  in  this  connection  of  the  important  fact  that 
this  object  was  to  bring  the  collection  that  he  had  gathered 
for  the  poor  of  the  church,  and  in  the  preceding  account  of 
his  resolution  to  go  to  Jerusalem  and  of  the  journey  thither 
there  is  no  intimation  of  his  benevolent  purpose.  Before 
the  time  for  the  completion  of  the  ceremony,  however,  the 
Jews,  among  whom  appear  to  have  been  some  of  his  old 
enemies  from  Asia,  fell  upon  him,  and  "went  about  to  kill 
him,"  and  he  was  saved  from  their  wrath  only  by  the  inter- 
ference of  the  "chief  captain  of  the  band"  and  his  soldiers 
(Acts  xxi.  27-34). 

The  unconcealed  hostility  of  the  Jewish-Christian  be- 
lievers is  unmistakable  in  the  terms  in  which  Paul  is 
asked  to  assume  the  Nazarite  vow.  He  is  told  that  there 
are  "  many  thousands  "  of  them,  and  that,  when  they  hear 
that  he  is  there,  "they  must  needs  come  together."  They 
have  heard  that  he  teaches  the  Jews  among  the  gentiles 
"not  to  circumcise  their  children,"  etc.,  and  the  manifest 
implication  is  that  he  will  be  in  peril  unless  he  joins  in  the 
performance  of  a  Jewish  rite  in  order  to  appease  them 
(Acts  xxi.  20).  It  is  no  wonder  that  emissaries  could  be 
found  in  Jerusalem  to  go  to  Galatia  and  Corinth.  To  this 
Acts  here  bears  unconscious  testimony,  although  the  book 
makes  no  mention  of  this  interference  from  any  quarter. 

*  See  Chapter  VII. 


EPHES US—R OME  I  3 7 

It  does  not  appear,  moreover,  that  of  these  "  many  thou- 
sands "  any  interfered  to  save  the  apostle,  who  had  come 
with  a  gift  of  love  to  their  poor,  from  the  hands  of  the  Jews 
who  would  have  killed  him.  After  he  was  a  prisoner  in  the 
hands  of  the  Romans,  these  zealots  for  the  law,  these 
"enemies  of  the  cross  of  Christ"  to  whom  the  Pauline 
apprehension  of  the  cross  was  an  "offence"  (Gal.  v.  11), 
continued  their  work  among  his  believers,  whom  he  warned 
against  them  out  of  his  imprisonment  "even  weeping" 
(Phil.  iii.  18,  cf.  verses  2,  3).  If  at  this  distance  in  time  and 
in  this  age  of  toleration  and  indifference  to  dogma,  we 
cannot  join  with  him  in  calling  them  "dogs,"  we  can  at 
least  sympathise  with  him  in  proportion  as  we  share  his 
noble  passion  for  liberty.  We  shall  do  well  to  consider, 
however,  that  these  men  were  doubtless  as  sincere  and 
conscientious  as  he  was  in  regarding  him  as  an  enemy  of 
Christ  and  a  perverter  of  his  gospel,  while  he  denounced 
them  as  "  false  apostles  "  and  ministers  of  Satan.  The 
situation  illustrates  the  persistence  and  indomitable  force 
of  dogma  in  a  dispensation  which  was  according  to  the 
poetic  fancy  of  an  evangelist  heralded  with  the  announce- 
ment of  "peace  and  good-will,"  but  which  under  the  con- 
ditions of  human  nature  could  not  "bring  peace." 

Paul  went  to  Rome  as  a  prisoner  on  his  appeal  to  Caesar, 
and  not,  as  he  had  hoped  and  expected  to  go,  as  a  mission- 
ary. From  Corinth  he  had  written  to  the  church  in  Rome 
that  he  had  often  purposed  to  come  to  them,  that  he  might 
have  some  fruit  among  them  also,  as  among  other  gentiles, 
and  that  so  far  as  in  him  lay  he  was  ready  to  preach  the 
gospel  to  them  (Rom.  i.  13-15,  xv.  25,  32).  This  city  was 
not  destined  to  be  a  field  of  his  personal  missionary  labours, 
yet  it  was  made  a  missionary  field  of  his  by  the  great 
Epistle.  This,  then,  calls  for  consideration  in  an  account 
of  his   missionary  activity,  more   especially  since,  having 


138  THE   MISSIONARY 

been  written  to  a  church  that  had  had  no  communication 
from  him,  it  probably  shows  more  than  any  other  of  his 
letters  his  method  of  presenting  his  message.  It  is  most 
distinctively  a  gospel-Epistle,  an  Epistle  of  the  Pauline 
gospel,  in  which  the  development  of  his  religious  and  theo- 
logical theme  is  not  disturbed  by  questions  of  administra- 
tion and  the  dealing  with  practical  affairs.  Conjectures  as 
to  when  and  by  whom  the  church  in  Rome  was  founded 
are  fruitless.  We  also  know  with  certainty  almost  nothing 
of  its  composition,  that  is,  whether  it  was  preponderatingly 
gentile-Christian  or  Jewish-Christian.  The  former  suppo- 
sition is  supported  by  such  passages  as  i.  13,  14,  xi.  13-32, 
and  especially  by  the  fact  that  the  apostle  grounds  his 
writing  of  the  Epistle  upon  his  apostleship  to  the  gentiles 
in  i.  5,  where  the  correct  rendering  is  "grace  and  apostle- 
ship for  obedience  to  the  faith  among  all  the  gentiles." 
On  the  other  hand,  not  a  little  of  the  argument  of  the 
Epistle  is  adapted  especially  to  Jewish  Christians  (iii.  1-8, 
31,  iv,  I,  vi.  15,  vii.  7,  13,  xi.  I,  11).  The  readers  are 
sometimes  addressed  as  knowing  the  law  or  formerly  under 
it  (vii.  1-5),  and  such  passages  as  ix.  1-5  and  x.  i  would  be 
inappropriate  unless  Jewish-Christian  readers  were  among 
those  for  whom  the  Epistle  was  intended.  These  doubt- 
less constituted  a  portion,  probably  a  minority,  of  the 
church.  In  any  case,  there  is  no  evidence  in  the  letter 
that  they  had  to  the  apostle's  knowledge  attempted  to 
force  the  gentile  Christians  to  accept  their  interpretation 
of  Christianity.  While  the  argument  of  the  Epistle  bears 
in  some  parts  an  analogy  to  that  of  Galatians,  the  note  of 
antagonism  to  Jewish  Christianity  which  we  discern  in 
the  latter  is  here  wanting,  and  the  treatment  of  the  law  in 
general  is  milder  and  more  conciliatory.  It  was  evidently 
written  out  of  a  different  mood  and  for  different  conditions. 
The  object   of  the    Epistle    is    clearly    indicated.     The 


EPHES  US  —  R  OME  1 3  9 

apostle  intended  to  visit  the  church  in  Rome  in  which  he 
was  deeply  interested,  making  mention  of  it  in  his  prayers 
(i.  9-13),  and  he  wrote  in  order  to  prepare  the  way  for  his 
coming  to  impart  to  them  "  some  spiritual  gift  to  the  end 
that  they  may  be  established"  (i.  11),  that  is,  may  be 
instructed  in  the  Pauline  gospel.  The  Epistle  indicates 
that  he  was  cognizant  of  difficulties  to  be  encountered  in 
Rome,  a  Jewish-Christian  opposition,  or  at  least  a  preju- 
dice, to  be  overcome,  and  it  was  written  with  this  end  in 
view.  There  may  have  been  a  conciliatory  purpose  in  his 
mention  of  his  mission  on  account  of  the  collection  for  the 
needy  Jewish  Christians  in  Jerusalem  (xv.  25-29),  and  the 
exhortation  to  unity  (xii.  3,  16,  xiv.  1-20,  xv.  5-9)  is 
naturally  connected  with  his  proposed  visit.  The  Epistle 
does  not,  accordingly,  constitute  an  exception  to  the  letters 
of  Paul  in  general  which  are  writings  directed  to  special 
local  occasions  and  exigencies,  and  is  not  to  be  regarded 
as  a  purely  dogmatic  treatise  addressed  to  the  world  at 
large. 

As  to  its  contents  the  Epistle  may  be  considered  in 
three  grand  divisions  :  i.  The  exposition  of  the  gospel  of 
the  righteousness  of  God  through  faith  and  not  through 
the  works  of  the  law  (i.-viii.);  2.  Proof  that  this  gospel  is 
not  prejudiced  by  the  failure  of  the  Jews  to  accept  it 
(ix.-xi.);  3.  Exhortations  adapted  to  the  conditions  in  the 
Roman  church  and  a  statement  of  the  reasons  for  writing: 
the  Epistle  (xii.-xv.).  After  the  introduction  (i.  1-15)  the 
theme  of  the  letter  is  stated  to  the  effect  that  the  gospel 
is  "  the  power  of  God  unto  salvation  to  every  one  that  be- 
lieveth,  to  the  Jew  first  and  also  to  the  Greek,"  etc.  (i.  16, 
17).  Then  follows  a  proof  of  the  futility  of  striving  for 
righteousness  by  works  on  the  ground  of  the  failure  of 
Jews  and  gentiles  alike  to  attain  it,  their  sinfulness,  and 
their  exposure  to  the  wrath  of  God  (i.   i8-iii.   20).     The 


140  THE  MISSIONARY 

atonement  is  shown  to  be  the  basis  of  the  only  true 
righteousness,  that  by  faith  (iii.  21-26).  There  follows, 
then,  the  declaration  that  the  Jews  have  nothing  to  boast 
of  in  respect  to  an  advantage  over  the  gentiles  (iii.  27-30). 
This  equality  of  Jews  and  gentiles  is  in  accord  with  the 
Old  Testament,  and  is  established  by  the  typical  faith  of 
Abraham  (iii.  31-iv.  25).  "Being  justified  by  faith  we 
have  peace  with  God,"  "justified  by  the  blood  of  Christ, 
we  shall  be  saved  from  wrath  through  him,"  and  we  "joy  in 
God  through  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  through  whom  we 
have  now  received  the  atonement"  (v.  1-2 1).  The 
Romans  are  exhorted  not  to  let  sin  reign  in  their  bodies, 
having  come  into  fellowship  with  Christ,  but  to  over- 
come the  impulses  of  the  flesh,  since  they  "are  not  under 
the  law,  but  under  grace."  "The  wages  of  sin  is  death, 
but  the  gift  of  God  is  eternal  life  through  Jesus  Christ  our 
Lord"  (vi.).  Under  the  law,  man  is  under  the  power  of 
sin  (vii.). 

The  mystic  fellowship  with*Christ  frees  from  "  condem- 
nation," and  the  Spirit  dwelling  in  the  believer  assures 
him  of  his  resurrection.  God's  "predestinated  "  cannot  be 
separated  from  His  love  (viii.).  The  second  division 
begins  with  a  declaration  of  the  apostle's  solicitude  and 
sorrow  on  account  of  the  Jews  (ix.  1-5).  The  Jews'  idea 
of  the  divine  promises  is  invalid,  because  God  is  not 
limited  in  His  promises  to  the  natural  descendants  of 
Abraham,  but  "hath  mercy  on  whom  He  will,  and 
whom  He  will  He  hardeneth,"  making  "one  vessel  unto 
honour  and  another  unto  dishonour  "  (ix.  6-29).  Israel  failed 
to  attain  righteousness  because  seeking  it  by  works  and 
not  by  faith.  The  true  righteousness  is  by  faith  through 
Christ  (ix.  30-x.  21).  God  has  not,  however,  "cast  away 
His  people,"  but  "there  is  a  remnant  according  to  the  elec- 
tion of  grace."      As  to  the  others,  their  exclusion  is  only 


EPHES  US—R  OME  1 4 1 

temporary,  and  when  *'  the  fuhiess  of  the  gentiles  be  come 
in,  all  Israel  shall  be  saved,"  for  God  hath  concluded  them 
all  in  unbelief,  that  He  might  have  mercy  upon  all.  Then 
follows  praise  of  God  for  "  the  depth  of  the  riches  of  His 
wisdom  and  knowledge  "  (xi.).  The  third  part  consists  of 
exhortations,  a  warning  against  self-exaltation,  the  recom- 
mendation of  brotherly  love,  unity,  and  conciliation,  an  ad- 
monition to  obey  "the  powers  that  be,"  the  injunction  to 
owe  no  man  anything,  but  to  love  one  another,  for  **  love 
is  the  fulfilling  of  the  law,"  and  the  grounding  of  these 
teachings  on  the  doctrine  of  the  near  approach  of  the  day 
of  the  Lord  (xii.,  xiii.).  Then  follow  some  admonitions 
regarding  divisions  in  the  church ;  the  relation  of  the 
strong  to  the  weak  in  faith  and  of  Jewish  and  gentile 
Christians  ;  a  mention  of  the  reason  for  writing  the  Epistle 
and  of  the  collection  for  the  needy  Christians  in  Jerusa- 
lem ;  a  communication  of  his  plan  to  visit  the  Romans 
(xiv.,  XV.);  the  letter  for  Phebe  probably  addressed  to  the 
church  in  Ephesus  (xvi.  1-20);  greetings  (xvi.  21-24); 
and  a  doxology,  probably  by  another  hand  (xvi.  25-27). 

This  Epistle  written  to  prepare  the  Romans  for  his 
intended  visit  to  them  is  the  most  complete  exposition  of 
the  apostle's  gospel  that  we  possess.  Its  purpose  mani- 
festly was  not  only  to  instruct  the  gentile  Christians  of  the 
church  in  Rome  in  the  fundamental  doctrines  of  his  mis- 
sion, but  also  to  overcome  the  opposition  of  the  Jewish 
Christians  whom  we  can  see  in  the  lines  of  the  letter  that 
he  had  constantly  in  mind.  In  his  argument  he  places 
himself  upon  their  ground,  adopts  their  point  of  view,  and 
employs  their  premises  and  forms  of  thought  in  order  to 
overthrow  their  pretensions.  From  the  point  of  view  of 
the  law  and  righteousness  by  works  he  brings  home  to 
their  consciousness  the  fact  of  universal  sinfulness  which 
they  cannot  deny.     **  For  circumcision  verily  profiteth  if 


142  THE   MISSIONARY 

thou  keep  the  law  ;  but  if  thou  be  a  breaker  of  the  law 
thy  circumcision  is  made  uncircumcision  "  (ii.  25).  Since 
none  of  you  keep  the  whole  law,  your  righteousness  by 
works  is  a  fiction.  He  proves  to  them  from  their  Script- 
ures that  "there  is  none  righteous,  no  not  one"  (iii.  10). 
As  to  Abraham,  his  faith  was  "counted  to  him  for  right- 
eousness," and  his  circumcision  was  "the  seal  of  the 
righteousness  of  the  faith  which  he  had  yet  being  uncir- 
cumcised,  that  he  might  be  the  father  of  all  them  that 
believe,  though  they  be  not  circumcised  "  (iv.  11).  Thus 
the  history  of  this  patriarch  is  made  to  support  the  gentile 
gospel.  The  law,  by  which  they  expect  to  be  saved,  only 
makes  sin  abound,  and  though  "ordained  to  life,"  is  on 
account  of  the  flesh  really  "unto  death  "  (vii.  8-24). 

The  logical  consequence  of  the  Jewish  doctrine  of 
atonement  the  apostle  shows  to  be  the  transfer  to  the 
believers  of  the  atoning  efficacy  of  the  blood  of  Christ, 
whom  God  "set  forth  to  be  a  propitiation  through  faith." 
Thus  the  law  which  man  cannot  fulfil  is  satisfied,  "  re- 
demption "  is  secured,  and  a  new  righteousness  "  imputed  " 
on  account  of  faith,  becomes  the  possession  of  the  believer, 
who  in  mystic  fellowship  with  Christ  has  the  witness  of 
the  Spirit  that  he  has  become  a  child  of  God  and  an  heir 
of  the  divine  promises  (iii.  20-28,  vi.  3-8,  viii.  9-18).  The 
greatness  of  the  conception  of  doctrine  in  the  Epistle  is 
apparent  in  its  historical  significance.  Two  great  periods 
of  human  history  are  set  over  against  each  other  —  the 
Adamic  order  of  sin  and  death,  and  the  Christ-order  of 
righteousness  and  life.  In  the  former  ruled  the  flesh  with 
its  fatal  consequences  of  transgression  and  destruction. 
In  the  latter  Christ  is  king  victorious  over  death,  "the 
end  of  the  law,"  the  beginning  of  a  new  order  of  life, 
which  will  be  consummated  in  the  resurrection  of  those 
who    believe   and    in    the    glory    of   the    kingdom.     Over 


EPHES  US  —  R  OME  1 43 

against  Judaism  and  Jewish  Christianity  this  doctrine  is  a 
new  conception  of  the  world,  a  new  interpretation  of  his- 
tory, a  new  philosophy  of  religion,  which  had  its  tempo- 
rary place  in  the  development  of  Christianity  —  a  second 
gospel  which  prepared  the  way  for  the  first  to  the  con- 
quest of  the  world. 

In  his  account  of  Paul's  journey  from  Caesarea  to  Je- 
rusalem the  writer  of  Acts  follows  his  we-source  beo:innino: 
with  chapter  xxvii.  Of  the  sources  of  the  preceding 
narrative  (xxii.-xxvi.)  we  know  nothing,  but  the  impression 
which  it  makes  upon  the  reader  is  that  its  vividness  is  due 
"not  so  much  to  the  knowledge  as  to  the  art  of  the  narra- 
tor." If  the  sources  were  tradition,  the  fancy  of  the 
writer,  and  his  own  invention  of  the  discourses,  such  a 
picture  as  is  presented  might  well  be  the  outcome.  That 
the  apostle  should  have  delivered  such  an  address  as  repre- 
sented before  the  mob  in  Jerusalem,  in  which  he  gives  an 
account  of  his  conversion,  has  been  declared  to  be  "  un- 
thinkable "  (Weizsacker).  It  is  at  least  improbable  (Acts 
xxii.  1-2 1 ). 

Improbable  also  it  is  that  Paul  should  have  said  before 
the  sanhedrim  that  he  was  called  in  question  on  account 
of  the  hope  of  the  resurrection  of  the  dead  (Acts  xxiii.  6), 
when  he  knew  very  well  that  the  gentile  mission  and  his 
attitude  toward  the  law  (Acts  xxi.  28)  had  excited  the 
Jews  against  him  ;  and  it  is  equally  unlikely  that  Pharisees 
and  Sadducees  should  have  forgotten  their  animosity 
toward  him,  and  fallen  into  a  strife  over  this  question, 
the  former  supporting  Paul  because  he  agreed  with  them 
on  this  point.  Felix  is  represented  as  keeping  Paul  in 
prison  and  often  "communing"  with  him  in  the  hope  of 
getting  money  from  him  (Acts  xxiv.  26)  !  Festus,  in  order 
that  he  may  have  some  "certain  thing  to  write"  to  Rome, 
calls  together  along  with    Agrippa    and    Bernice  a  grand 


144  THE   MISSIONARY 

assembly  of  "  the  chief  captains  and  principal  men  of  the 
city,"  before  whom  Paul  delivers  an  extended  discourse, 
in  which  he  again  tells  of  his  conversion  with  the  impor- 
tant variation  from  his  previous  account  of  it  that  he 
represents  Jesus  as  making  an  extended  speech  to  him  out 
of  heaven,  which  concludes  with  the  announcement  that 
Paul  is  sent  to  the  gentiles  "to  open  their  eyes,  and  to 
turn  them  from  darkness  to  light,  and  from  the  power  of 
Satan  unto  God,  that  they  may  receive  forgiveness  of  sins 
and  inheritance  among  them  who  are  sanctified  by  faith 
that  is  in  me  "  (Acts  xxvi.  1-18)  ! 

Festus  succeeded  Felix  in  the  year  61,  according  to  the 
generally  accepted  chronology,  and  there  is  no  reason  for 
supposing  that  he  delayed  sending  Paul  to  Rome  on  his 
appeal  to  the  Emperor.  The  two-years  imprisonment  in 
Ccesarea,  however,  remains  a  problem  in  view  of  the  fact 
that  according  to  Acts  Felix  could  not  have  believed  the 
apostle  ''  worthy  of  death  or  of  bonds."  The  reasons  given 
why  he  detained  him  are  trivial.  The  account  of  the  voy- 
age to  Rome  given  in  the  trustworthy  we-section  of  Acts 
shows  interesting  traits  of  the  apostle's  personality.  After 
the  author  brings  him  to  Rome,  however,  he  has  little  more 
to  tell.  He  leaves  him  there  in  comfortable  imprisonment 
living  in  his  "hired  house"  under  the  guard  of  a  soldier 
(Acts  xxviii.  16,  30).  That  he  must  have  known  of  the  tragic 
fate  of  his  hero  one  cannot  but  believe,  and  it  is  one  of  the 
many  problems  of  the  book  why  he  tells  us  nothing  of  it. 
The  epistle  of  Clement  of  Rome  to  the  Corinthians,  writ- 
ten at  the  end  of  the  first  or  the  beginning  of  the  second 
century,  leaves  no  doubt  that  he  suffered  martyrdom. 

Thus  ended  the  earthly  career  of  the  man  who  among  the 
apostles  and  early  followers  of  Jesus  is  eminently  entitled 
to  be  called  great.  Intent  upon  carrying  the  message  of 
the  cross  far  and  wide  in  the  earth,  zealoj.is,  intense,  and 


EPHES  US  —  R  OME  1 4  5 

courageous,  he  was  the  foremost  of  missionaries.  His  life  in 
the  service  of  his  Master  was  a  succession  of  conflicts,  and 
was  passed  amidst  conditions  of  hardship,  sacrifice,  and 
labour  at  a  wretched  handicraft  for  his  own  support.  Under 
the  circumstances  his  achievement  must  be  regarded  as 
remarkable,  although  the  number  of  his  converts  was  not 
large,  and  many  of  the  little  churches  which  he  founded 
early  disappeared,  and  have  left  no  record  in  the  history  of 
Christianity.  His  passion  for  liberty  and  his  fearless 
defence  of  his  convictions  against  tendencies  which  would 
have  resulted  in  stifling  Christianity  in  its  cradle,  denote  a 
championship  of  principles  to  whose  success  and  supremacy 
is  due  all  that  is  most  precious  and  fruitful  in  human  civilisa- 
tion. His  apostleship  of  the  gentiles  was  the  apostleship 
and  the  gospel  of  humanity,  of  freedom  from  the  yoke  of 
formalism,  and  of  the  love  that  ''hopeth  all  things." 
Whatever  may  be  the  fortune  of  his  dogmatic  interpreta- 
tion of  Christianity  in  the  judgment  of  mankind,  his  spiritual 
interpretation  of  it,  his  idea  of  the  mystic  fellowship  with 
Jesus,  and  his  conception  of  the  life  that  is  hid  with  Christ 
in  God,  will  be  cherished  by  the  devout  wherever  the 
religion  of  the  Master  shall  be  most  deeply  understood.. 
His  ethical  zeal,  his  life  of  devotion,  of  heroic  sacrifice,  of 
single-eyed  service,  of  unflinching  fidelity,  will  remain  as  an 
ideal  and  inspiration  to  the  generations  to  come.  His  ideas 
and  conflicts  as  well  as  certain  traits  of  his  personality 
isolated  him  in  his  life,  and  rendered  him  a  solitary  figure 
in  primitive-Christian  history.  Alone,  a  unique  and 
majestic  figure,  he  went  to  his  death  amidst  the  decay  of 
the  mightiest  pagan  civilisation — yet  not  to  death,  but  to 
the  resurrection  and  the  life  which  in  the  order  of  God 
belong  to  the  true,  the  brave,  and  the  good. 

L 


CHAPTER    VII 

THE  PAUL  OF  THE  ACTS  AND  THE  PAUL  OF  THE  EPISTLES* 

IN  the  history  of  apostolic  Christianity  no  subject  is  of 
more  importance  than  the  part  taken  by  the  apostle  to 
the  gentiles  in  the  activities  of  the  time,  and  the  relation 
which  he  held  to  the  "pillars"  of  the  church  in  Jerusalem 
respecting  the  burning  question  as  to  the  conditions  on 
which  the  converted  heathen  should  be  admitted  into  the 
community  of  expectant  believers,  to  whom  the  coming  of 
their  Lord  from  heaven  would,  they  believed,  secure  the 
complete  fruition  of  the  kingdom  of  God.  The  difificulties 
of  the  problem,  which  are  evident  from  the  difference  of 
opinion  on  important  points  still  apparent  after  an  exhaus- 
tive discussion  during  nearly  three  quarters  of  a  century, 
arise  from  the  relation  of  the  two  sources  of  informa- 
tion on  the  subject,  the  Acts  and  the  Pauline  Epistles. 
That  these  two  sources  differ  widely  both  in  some  matters 
which  they  have  in  common  and  in  incidents  and  circum- 
stances contained  in  one  of  them  alone  no  one  will  under- 
take to  dispute.  The  historical  trustworthiness  of  the 
only  canonical  account  of  the  fortunes  of  the  apostolical 
church  has  accordingly  been  the  centre  about  which  the 
conflict  of  opinion  Ijas  raged  most  violently.  It  has  been 
maintained  that  this  ostensible  history  is  in  fact  a  ''  ten- 
dency-writing," the  author  of  which,  having  a  certain  theory 
of  the  relations  of  the  parties  in  the  early  church  to  estab- 
lish, invented  situations  and  suppressed  facts  in  the  inter- 
est of  his  manifest  purpose  ;  that  remote  from  the  events 

*  The  New  World,  June,  1897. 
146 


PAUL    OF   THE   ACTS  AND    THE   EPISTLES  1 47 

and  depending  on  sources  not  altogether  good  he  has  ideal- 
ised the  history,  and  given  the  colour  of  his  own  time  to 
important  episodes  ;  and  that  (as  Spitta  has  recently  done) 
by  assigning  various  portions  of  the  book  to  sources  of 
different  degrees  of  credibility  a  tolerably  consistent  his- 
tory can  be  constructed  from  the  best  of  them,  and  the 
difficulties  diminished  by  the  assumption  of  the  author's 
defective  information.  Adherents  of  the  apologetic  school 
have  proceeded  upon  the  assumption  of  the  general  trust- 
worthiness of  the  history  in  Acts,  and  have  employed  the 
expedients  and  arts  of  the  harmonist  in  order  to  bring  it 
into  accord  with  the  Pauline  Epistles.  Sympathy  with 
this  procedure  is  apparent  in  some  details  of  the  treatment 
of  the  subject  by  a  few  representatives  of  the  critical  ten- 
dency, particularly  Keim  and  Pfleiderer  (see  the  former's 
Atcs  deni  Urchristenthuin  and  the  latter' s  Das  UrcJiristen- 
thum). 

Paul's  relation  to  the  heads  of  the  church  in  Jerusalem 
and  his  attitude  toward  the  Jewish  ceremonial  observances 
are  matters  of  great  importance  in  forming  a  judgment  of 
his  character  and  work  and  of  the  course  of  affairs  in  the 
history  of  apostolic  Christianity.  He  himself  lays  so 
much  stress  upon  the  former  that  we  are  not  justified  in 
passing  lightly  over  it,  and  in  a  judgment  upon  the  latter 
is  involved  something  more  than  the  consistency  of  his 
conduct  with  principles  which  he  clearly  enunciated. 
Great  difficulties  present  themselves  in  the  attempt  to 
reconcile  his  own  positive  affirmations  regarding  these 
matters  with  the  accounts  of  them  in  Acts.  In  writing  to 
the  Galatians  of  his  conversion,  which  he  thought  to  be 
the  revelation  of  God's  Son  in  him  for  the  express  purpose 
that  he  might  "preach  him  among  the  gentiles,"  he  de- 
clares in  a  manner  which  shows  that  he  regarded  his  inde- 
pendence of  men  and  his  immediate  authority  from  God  as 


148  THE   MISSIONARY 

involved  in  the  statement,  that  he  "  conferred  not  with 
flesh  and  blood,"  neither  went  up  to  Jerusalem  to  the  apos- 
tles, but  went  away  into  Arabia,  then  returned  to  Damas- 
cus, and  after  three  years  went  to  Jerusalem  to  visit  Peter 
tarrying  with  him  fifteen  days  and  seeing  no  other  of  the 
apostles,  but  only  James,  the  Lord's  brother  (Gal.  i.  16, 
17).  To  this  fragment  of  biography  he  adds  the  emphatic 
declaration :  "  Now,  touching  the  things  which  I  write 
unto  you,  behold,  before  God,  I  lie  not."  On  the  con- 
trary, the  writer  of  Acts  betrays  a  purpose  to  bring  Paul 
after  his  conversion  with  all  possible  despatch  into  rela- 
tions with  the  apostles  in  Jerusalem,  as  if  to  make  it  ap- 
pear that  he  sought  there  the  very  recognition  which  he 
himself  takes  pains  to  affirm  that  he  did  not  want.  Omit- 
ting mention  of  the  journey  to  Arabia  he  represents  Paul 
as  betaking  himself  immediately  to  the  synagogue  in  Da- 
mascus and  there  preaching  Jesus  to  the  Jews,  as  if  he 
had  no  thought  of  a  mission  to  the  gentiles.  The  Jews, 
displeased  with  the  proclamation  of  Jesus  as  "the  Son  of 
God,"  attempt  to  kill  him,  and  he  escapes  with  difficulty 
and  repairs  to  Jerusalem,  where  he  tries  to  ''join  himself 
to  the  disciples,"  who,  it  appears,  were  suspicious  of  him, 
and  received  him  only  through  the  intervention  of  Bar- 
nabas. 

That  these  two  accounts  convey,  or  were  intended  by 
their  writers  to  convey,  the  same  conception  of  Paul's 
movements  directly  after  his  conversion  and  of  his  rela- 
tions with  Jerusalem,  cannot  be  successfully  maintained. 
They  are  not  so  related  that  one  can  be  said  to  supple- 
ment the  other,  so  that  the  two  can  be  combined  into  a 
consistent  and  probable  narrative.  The  purpose  of  the 
writers,  so  far  as  it  can  be  judged  by  their  reports,  was  not 
to  relate  the  same  course  of  events.  Either  the  author  of 
Acts  did  not  know  of  the  journey  to  Arabia,  —  in  which  case 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE  EPISTLES  1 49 

he  could  not  have  read  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  —  or 
knowing  it  he  omitted  mention  of  it  for  a  purpose  not  far 
to  seek.  He  evidently  did  not  intend  that  the  inference 
should  be  drawn  from  his  narrative  that  Paul  allowed  three 
years  to  elapse  from  his  conversion  before  seeking  the  ac- 
quaintance of  the  original  apostles  or  endeavouring  to  "■  at- 
tach "  himself  to  them.  The  term  of  his  residence  in 
Damascus  is  given  as  "a  considerable  number  of  days" 
(rjfjLepat  Uavat),  and  this  answers  all  the  requirements  of 
Paul's  own  account  of  the  episode  in  2  Cor.  xi.  32,  33. 
The  sojourn  in  Arabia  and  the  return  to  Damascus  are  ex- 
cluded by  the  immediate  sequence  of  the  mention  of  the 
journey  to  Jerusalem.  The  supposition  that  the  persecu- 
tion in  Damascus  occurred,  according  to  the  meaning  and 
intention  of  the  writer  of  Acts,  after  Paul's  return  from 
Arabia,  or  three  years  after  his  first  arrival  in  that  city,  is 
contrary  to  the  evident  sense  of  rj/jbepat  Uavai,  and  requires 
a  reading  into  the  passage  of  a  sense  which  was  manifestly 
not  intended,  and  which  only  the  interest  of  a  violent  har- 
monising could  suggest.  It  is,  moreover,  rendered  im- 
probable by  the  subsequent  events  in  Jerusalem  recorded 
by  the  writer  of  Acts  himself.  For  he  represents  the 
apostles  in  Jerusalem  as  suspicious  of  Paul  and  ignorant 
of  his  conversion,  so  that  the  good  offices  of  Barnabas  were 
necessary  in  order  that  he  might  succeed  in  his  effort  to 
''attach"  himself  to  them, — a  condition  of  affairs  which 
has  not  been  too  strongly  characterised  as  "  unthinkable  " 
three  years  after  the  great  event  on  the  road  to  Damascus 
and  a  ministry  in  the  synagogues  of  that  city.  Damascus 
was  not  so  remote  from  Jerusalem,  and  intercourse  be- 
tween the  two  cities  so  infrequent,  that  the  apostles  can 
be  supposed  not  to  have  heard  of  the  conversion  of  the 
vehement  persecutor  of  the  Christians.  Moreover,  the 
account  in  Acts  of  this  first  visit  of  Paul  in  Jerusalem  does 


I50  THE   MISSIONARY 

not  accord  with  that  of  the  apostle  himself  in  other  particu- 
lars. Paul  represents  that  he  went  up  to  Jerusalem  to  visit 
Peter,  and  that  during  the  fifteen  days  of  his  sojourn  there 
he  saw  no  other  one  of  the  apostles,  but  did  see  James,  the 
brother  of  Jesus,  who  was  not  an  apostle  (Gal.  i.  i8,  19). 
On  the  contrary,  it  is  explicitly  stated  in  Acts  that  when 
he  came  to  Jerusalem  he  endeavoured  to  "attach  himself 
to  the  disciples,"  that  they  were  ^^ all  afraid  of  him,"  and 
that  Barnabas  "  took  him  and  brought  him  to  the  apos- 
tles"  (ix.  26,  27).  As  Paul's  declaration  that  the  object 
of  his  journey  was  to  visit  Peter,  and  that  he  saw  no  other 
one  of  the  apostles,  was  not  without  an  intention  in  con- 
nection with  the  assertion  of  his  independence,  so  the 
writer  of  Acts,  if  he  was  not  ignorant  of  the  facts,  could 
hardly  have  related  without  a  purpose  ("tendency")  a 
story  of  directly  the  opposite  purport, — that  Paul  on  his 
arrival  in  Jerusalem  did  not  simply  visit  one  of  the  twelve, 
but  endeavoured  to  "attach"  {/coXXaaOaL^  himself  to  the 
apostles  in  general,  and  was  taken  to  them  by  Barnabas  to 
this  end.  Again,  the  apostle's  declaration  that  immedi- 
ately thereafter  he  was  "  unknown  by  face  to  the  churches 
of  Judea  "  (Gal.  i.  22)  is  irreconcilable  with  the  statement 
in  Acts  that  he  was  introduced  to  the  apostles,  and  con- 
ducted for  some  time  an  active  ministry  in  Jerusalem  (ix. 
2S,  29);  and  especially  with  the  words  which  the  writer 
puts  into  the  mouth  of  Paul  in  one  of  the  accounts  of  his 
conversion,  that  immediately  after  that  event  he  preached 
repentance  "both  to  them  of  Damascus  first  and  at  Jeru- 
salem and  throughout  all  the  country  of  Judea  and  also  to 
the  gentiles  "  (xxvi.  20). 

It  is  evidently  necessary  to  an  understanding  of  the  in- 
fluences which  determined  the  history  of  primitive  Chris- 
tianity as  well  as  to  a  knowledge  of  Paul's  motives  and 
character  and    actions  to    make   a   right  choice  between 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE  EPISTLES  151 

these  two  accounts,  since  no  combination  of  them  into  a 
consistent  whole  can  be  fairly  made.  The  testimony  of 
the  apostle  must  not  assuredly  be  rejected  in  the  face  of 
his  asseveration  of  truthfulness  (Gal.  i.  21).  His  genuine 
Epistles  must  be  regarded  as  a  first-class  source  outrank- 
ing in  trustworthiness  the  record  of  Acts,  of  whose  writer 
and  his  means  of  information  we  are,  to  say  the  least,  not 
accurately  informed.  In  any  case  we  are  compelled  to 
believe  that  he  was  either  ignorant  of  important  facts  or 
capable  of  suppressing  them  in  the  interest  of  a  theory  of 
primitive-Christian  history  or  of  seeing  them  inaccurately 
through  the  medium  of  a  later  time.  It  is  also  inadmissi- 
ble to  read  the  record  of  Acts  into  the  statements  of  Paul 
regarding  his  relations  with,  and  his  attitude  toward,  the 
original  apostles,  since  to  do  so  is  to  modify  his  testimony 
to  the  extent  that  it  is  practically  invalidated.  In  like 
manner,  the  story  in  Acts  cannot  be  interpreted  by  insert- 
ing into  its  framework  the  historical  incidents  mentioned 
in  Galatians  without  reaching  a  result  which  is  opposed  to 
the  manifest  intention  of  the  writer  of  that  book.  Noth- 
ing is  gained  by  this  attempt  to  maintain  the  credibility  of 
an  author  whose  work  is  admitted  by  many  of  those  who 
engage  on  his  side  to  contain  not  a  few  unhistorical  and 
improbable  accounts.  The  injury  to  a  sound  hermeneutics 
resulting  from  such  a  procedure  has  no  compensation. 
After  making  all  due  allowances  for  Paul's  zeal  as  an  ''ad- 
vocate "  (see  W.  W.  Fenn,  Lessons  on  the  Acts,  p.  50),  we 
cannot  impugn  his  testimony  in  any  important  particu- 
lar without  attacking  his  character  for  integrity ;  and  this 
any  one  should  hesitate  to  do  on  the  authority  of  a  writing 
composed  perhaps  from  forty  to  fifty  years  after  the  events 
in  question  occurred,  from  sources  about  which  we  must 
remain  uncertain.  If  Paul  on  his  first  visit  to  Jerusalem 
after  his  conversion  did  not  go  solely  to  visit  Peter,  and 


152  THE  MISSIONARY 

if  it  is  not  true  that  he  saw  no  other  of  the  apostles,  but 
sought  to  "attach"  himself  to  the  twelve,  then  is  Gala- 
tians  rather  than  Acts  a  "tendency-writing,"  if  not  worse, 
and  important  consequences  must  follow  for  our  construc- 
tion of  the  history  of  apostolic  Christianity. 

The  report  in  Acts  of  other  journeys  of  Paul  to  Jerusa- 
lem is  not  favourable  to  the  trustworthiness  of  that  record, 
or  to  the  correctness  of  the  writer's  conception  of  the 
relation  of  the  apostle  to  Judaism.  The  account  of 
the  journey  undertaken  in  order  to  carry  "  relief  to  the 
brethren  that  dwelt  in  Judea "  (xi.  29)  is  manifestly 
incorrect  according  to  Gal.  ii.  i,  for  it  supposes  a  connec- 
tion with  Jerusalem  which  Paul  could  not  have  omitted  to 
mention  in  that  context  without  exposing  himself  to  the 
charge  of  evasion  or  concealment.  The  unmistakable 
meaning  of  his  words  is,  that  he  did  not  go  up  to  the 
holy  city  after  the  visit  recorded  in  Acts  ix.  26-30  (Gal.  i. 
18-20)  until  fourteen  years  afterward,  but  was  unknown 
in  the  mean  time  to  the  churches  in  Judea  (Gal.  i.  22). 
This  second  visit,  mentioned  in  Gal.  ii.  i,  is  identical  with 
that  recorded  in  Acts  xv.  2,  and  here  incorrectly  appears  as 
the  third.  Meyer's  expedient,  that  in  the  journey  recorded 
in  Acts  xi.  29  Paul  did  not  go  as  far  as  Jerusalem,  is 
scarcely  worthy  of  refutation  (see  Mr.  Fenn,  nt  supra,  p. 
64).  A  journey  to  Jerusalem  is  intimated  in  Acts  xviii.  22 
{ava^d^)  which  has  caused  no  little  perplexity  to  the  com- 
mentators. In  verse  21  Paul  appears  in  great  haste  to  get 
away  from  Ephesus,  though  for  what  reason  does  not 
appear,  unless  the  words  are  genuine  :  "  I  must  by  all 
means  keep  this  feast  that  cometh  in  Jerusalem."  They 
are  wanting  in  ABESin.,  and  some  other  MSS.,  and  are 
omitted  by  Lachmann  and  Tischendorf ;  but  most  MSS., 
the  Syrian  included,  retain  them,  and  they  are  defended 
by  Zeller,   Ewald,   De  Wette-Overbeck,    Hilgenfeld,    and 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE  EPISTLES  153 

Meyer.  Their  omission  in  the  cases  mentioned  is  ac- 
counted for  by  Meyer  with  great  probability  on  account 
of  the  uncertainty  of  the  sense  of  ava^d<^  (verse  22) ;  but 
that  the  reference  here  is  to  Jerusalem  is  regarded  by 
Weizsacker  as  unquestionable.  The  words  "and  went 
down  to  Antioch  "  (verse  22)  can  hardly  signify  anything 
else  than  a  journey  from  Jerusalem  to  Antioch.  The 
entire  account  is  involved  in  great  uncertainty,  and 
Holtzmann  very  properly  remarks  on  the  improbability 
of  Paul's  making  a  journey  to  Jerusalem  at  this  period  of 
"open  conflict."  The  intention  of  the  author  of  Acts, 
however,  to  represent  that  such  a  journey  was  made,  is 
scarcely  to  be  doubted,  whether  its  purpose  was  to  attend 
a  Jewish  festival  or  to  "salute  the  church."  The  supposi- 
tion that  he  was  misinformed  or  confused  by  his  sources 
can  alone  save  him  from  the  charge  of  a  definite  intention 
to  bring  Paul  as  frequently  as  possible  into  friendly  rela- 
tions with  the  church  in  Jerusalem,  regardless  of  histori- 
cal accuracy.  Such  an  intention  is  probable  in  xix.  21, 
where  Paul  is  represented  as  having  "purposed  in  the 
spirit  ...  to  go  to  Jerusalem,"  without  any  apparent 
motive  in  the  midst  of  his  successful  activity  in  Ephesus, 
where  "  mightily  grew  the  work  of  the  Lord  and  pre- 
vailed." This  view  of  the  matter  is  supported  by  the 
apparent  interest  of  the  writer  in  making  the  apostle 
seem  to  have  been  zealous  in  the  observance  of  Jewish 
ceremonies,  when  he  puts  into  his  mouth  the  declarations 
that  he  went  up  to  Jerusalem  to  worship  and  to  present 
offerings  in  the  temple,  and  that,  "after  the  way  which 
they  call  a  sect,"  he  served  the  God  of  our  fathers,  "be- 
lieving all  things  which  are  according  to  the  law"  (xxiv. 
II,  14,  17);  and  when  he  represents  him,  according  to 
the  most  probable  rendering,  as  "having  shorn  his  head 
in  Cenchrea,  for  he  had  a  vow  "  (xviii.  18). 


154  THE   MISSIONARY 

More  befitting  the  Paul  of  the  Acts  than  the  Paul  of 
the  Epistles  is  the  account  of  a  procedure  of  his  in  Jeru- 
salem in  connection  with  a  Nazarite  vow  (Acts  xxi.  21-24). 
Paul  is  here  informed  by  ''the  elders"  that  the  Jewish 
Christians,  who  were  "all  zealous  for  the  law,"  had  been 
told  that  he  was  teaching  the  Jews  who  were  among  the 
gentiles  to  forsake  Moses,  and  neither  to  circumcise  their 
children  nor  to  walk  after  the  customs ;  and  is  advised  by 
them  to  take  four  men  who  had  a  vow  on  them,  purify 
himself  with  them,  and  be  at  charges  for  them,  that  they 
may  shave  their  heads,  that  all  might  know  that  the  accu- 
sations against  him  were  false,  and  that  he  was  walking 
orderly  and  keeping  the  law.  This  Paul  is  represented  as 
having  done  without  a  word  of  objection,  as  if  he  were 
himself  a  zealot  for  the  law !  Since  he  is  said  to  have 
acted  on  the  advice  of  the  elders  in  order  to  invalidate  the 
charge  that  he  was  teaching  the  Jewish  Christians  not  to 
circumcise  their  children  and  observe  the  customs,  the 
question  arises  whether  he  could  have  regarded  this 
charge  as  a  calumniation  to  be  answered  by  such  a  sub- 
jection of  himself  to  a  Jewish  ceremonial.  The  Paul  of 
the  Acts,  the  Paul  of  the  so-called  apostolic  council,  as 
reported  by  the  author  of  that  book,  may  have  made  the 
unresisting  concession  here  related  if  the  words  of  the 
elders,  probably  by  the  mouth  of  James,  can  be  regarded 
as  a  commentary  on  the  decree  of  that  council  :  "  That 
thou  thyself  walkest  orderly,  keeping  the  law.  But  as 
touching  the  gentiles  who  have  believed,  we  wrote,"  etc. 
(verses  24,  25).  For  the  import  of  this  plainly  is  that  Paul 
and  other  Jewish  Christians  were  bound  by  the  terms  of 
the  council,  as  Jews,  to  observe  the  law,  while  the  gentiles 
were  exempted.  But  could  the  historical  Paul,  the  Paul 
of  the  Epistles,  ever  have  accepted  such  a  principle } 
Could  he  have  deemed  himself  calumniated  by  the  charge 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE  EPISTLES  1 55 

that  be  taught  his  Jewish  converts  not  to  circumcise  their 
children  ?  Must  not  he  have  opposed  on  principle  the 
subjection  of  the  offspring  of  Christian  parents  to  this 
rite,  he  who  solemnly  declared  to  the  Galatians,  "  I,  Paul, 
say  unto  you  that  if  ye  receive  circumcision,  Cbrist  will 
profit  you  nothing"  (Gal.  v.  2)?  Would  he  not  have 
thought  them,  if  circumcised,  to  be  as  truly  ''debtors  to 
do  the  whole  law  "  as  he  affirmed  that  the  gentile  converts 
would  be  ?  It  is  futile,  as  Zeller  has  shown,  to  quote 
I  Cor.  vii.  18  f.,  for  according  to  Paul's  gospel  of  uncir- 
cumcision  the  children  of  Jewish-Christian  parents  were 
born  ev  aKpo^varia  (see  i  Cor.  vii.  14),  and  hence  the  in- 
junction jJiTj  Treptre/jLvecrOco  was  applicable  to  them.  It  is 
evident  that  more  was  involved  for  Paul  in  the  advice  of 
the  elders  than  the  mere  performance  of  a  Jewish  rite, 
more  than  a  matter  which  he  could  have  ''deemed  indif- 
ferent." The  central  principle  of  his  gospel  was  at  stake, 
since  he  was  asked  to  refute  a  charge  which,  according  to 
his  entire  teaching,  was  false ;  and  if  such  a  counsel  was 
given  him  he  must  have  resented  it  as  an  insult,  and  have 
felt  that  to  follow  it  were  a  degradation.  But,  conceding 
that  he  had  connived  at  the  circumcision  of  the  children 
of  the  beheving  Jews  of  the  dispersion  or  permitted  it,  one 
cannot  but  think  with  Holtzmann  that  it  involved  a  sort 
of  mental  reservation,  an  ambiguous  proceeding,  or,  at 
least,  anything  but  a  grand  mode  of  action,  to  make  use 
of  such  a  fact  in  Jerusalem  as  a  last  resort  for  the  support 
of  the  assertion  that  all  which  they  had  heard  of  his  under- 
mining of  the  law  was  nothing,  and  for  the  promotion  of 
the  idea  that  he  "walked  orderly,  keeping  the  law."  Un- 
der the  circumstances,  Paul's  tame  and  humiliating  accept- 
ance of  the  advice  of  the  elders  can  be  regarded  according 
to  the  record  as  nothing  short  of  an  acknowledgment  that 
he  was,  contrary    to   i    Cor.    ix.   20,    viro  rbv   vojulov   as    a 


156  THE   MISSIONARY 

(f)v\d(Tcrcov  Tov  vo/nov.  For  ''all  apologetic  efforts  go  to 
pieces  upon  the  fact  that  no  act  of  accommodation,  but  a 
confession  is  reported,  and  turn  moreover  into  charges  as 
well  against  James  as  against  Paul,  to  the  effect  that  the 
advice  of  the  former  was  unsatisfactory,  unfitting,  un- 
timely, and  the  following  of  it  on  the  part  of  the  latter  a 
*  weakness  and  undue  haste  '  "  (^Hand-Commentar,  i.  p.  407). 
Apropos  of  the  fact  that  Calvin  thought  that  he  must 
excuse  the  one  as  well  as  the  other  for  participation  in  the 
superstitious  vow,  Hausrath  remarks  that  it  is  rather  cred- 
ible that  Calvin  on  his  death-bed  should  have  vowed  a 
golden  robe  to  the  Mother  of  God  than  that  Paul  should 
have  gone  in  the  way  indicated. 

The  account  of  the  circumcision  of  Timothy  by  Paul 
(Acts  xvi.  1-4)  presents  similar  difficulties.  Timothy,  ac- 
cording to  the  report,  was  a  convert  to  Christianity,  whose 
father  was  a  Greek.  His  mother,  however,  was  a  Jewess, 
and  he  had  not  been  circumcised.  Paul  wanted  him  as  a 
companion,  and  performed  the  Jewish  rite  upon  him,  ''on 
account  of  the  Jews  that  were  in  those  parts."  To  one 
whose  knowledge  of  Paul's  character  and  principles  is  de- 
rived entirely  from  Acts,  this  narrative,  related  as  if  the 
proceeding  were  a  matter  of  course,  would  present  no  seri- 
ous difficulty.  But  the  case  is  quite  different  when  we  un- 
dertake to  judge  of  it  with  the  Paul  in  mind  who  vehe- 
mently rebuked  Peter  in  Antioch  for  "dissimulation,"  and 
wrote  the  account  of  his  determined  opposition  to  the  cir- 
cumcision of  Titus  in  Jerusalem.  Meyer  expresses  the 
opinion  that  Paul  could  not  have  performed  the  rite  on 
this  occasion  if  the  request  had  been  made  by  Jewish 
Christians,  but  might  have  done  it  "on  account  of  the 
Jews,"  so  that  they  should  not  take  offence  at  his  having 
as  a  companion  an  uncircumcised  man  who  was  on  one 
side  of  Jewish  parentage.      But  it  is  not  apparent  why  he 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE   EPISTLES  157 

should  yield  to  Jews  what  he  would  not  concede  to  Jewish 
Christians,  and  in  fact  refused  to  them  in  the  case  of 
Titus.  If  he  was  willing  to  be  as  a  Jew  to  Jews  in  order 
that  he  might  gain  some  of  them,  can  he  be  supposed  to 
have  carried  this  accommodation  so  far  as  to  perform  the 
rite  of  circumcision  upon  a  Christian  companion  out  of 
deference  to  Jewish  prejudice  ?  The  judgment  must  turn 
upon  the  question  whether  for  Paul  a  principle  was  at 
stake  in  the  case.  Professor  Pfleiderer  remarks  on  the 
subject  that  such  a  condescension  of  Paul's  constitutes  so 
striking  a  contrast  to  his  inflexibility  regarding  Titus, 
shortly  before  in  Jerusalem,  that  a  doubt  of  the  correctness 
of  the  account  seems  justified.  The  apostle,  he  says,  was 
always  unyielding  where  questions  of  religious  principle 
arose  out  of  legal  externalities ;  while,  where  this  was  not 
the  case,  he  judged  the  latter  as  religious  dSidcjiopa*  and 
made  no  objection.!  This  scholar  finds  a  solution  of  the 
difficulty  in  the  supposition  that  the  writer  of  Acts  has 
placed  here  an  event  which  occurred  early  in  Paul's  minis- 
try, when  according  to  Gal.  v.  11,  the  apostle  may  have 
favoured  circumcision.  But,  to  say  nothing  of  the  absence 
of  grounds  for  the  assumption  of  a  displacement  of  the 
narrative,  the  passage  referred  to  does  not  necessarily 
imply  that  Paul  advocated  circumcision  at  the  beginning 
of  his  ministry,  or  ever  as  an  apostle.  The  passage  is 
equivalent  to,  "  If  I  were  still  preaching  circumcision,  I 
should  not  still  be  persecuted."  f  But  it  is  very  doubtful 
whether  the  apostle  could  have  regarded  such  a  matter  as 
among  dhtdcjiopa,  or  things  indifferent,  either  before  or  after 
the  episode  concerning  Titus.     The  proceeding  is  in  direct 

*  ddidcpopa,  things  indifferent, 
t  Das  U7-christenth2tm,  p.  585  f. 

X  ei  TrepLTOfMrjp  '4tl  iK7ipv(rcrov,  ovk€tl  av  idiuKOfxrjp.     See  Meyer,  Commenfar, 
in  loc,  and  Lipsius,  Hand-Cominentar,  ii.  p.  59. 


158  THE  MISSIONARY 

opposition  to  the  doctrine  :  "  If  any  one  is  called  in  uncir- 
cumcision,  let  him  remain  uncircumcised  "  (i  Cor.  vii.  18). 
One  can  hardly  think  of  Paul  as  circumcising  a  believer 
"on  account  of  the  Jews"  when  he  held  that  the  rite 
implied  the  obligation  to  keep  the  whole  law,  and  that 
Christ  profited  him  nothing  on  whom  it  was  performed. 
The  question  has  well  been  raised  why  the  apostle  whose 
ministry  was  to  the  gentiles  should  be  believed  to  have 
made  such  a  concession  "  on  account  of  the  Jews."  About 
to  depart  on  a  journey,  why  should  he  regard  the  prejudice 
of  '' the  Jews  that  were  in  those  parts".'*  If  the  "incon- 
sistency "  of  Paul  is  to  be  easily  assumed,  he  should  not  at 
least  be  charged  with  it  unless  a  good  reason  for  it  can  be 
shown.  Not  without  grounds  has  doubt  been  cast  upon 
this  narrative,  which  probably  does  not  belong  to  the  "we- 
source,"  because  of  the  writer's  apparent  purpose  to  repre- 
sent Paul  as  chiefly  associating  in  his  ministry  with  those 
to  whom  the  unbelieving  Jews,  zealots  for  the  law,  would 
take  no  exception.  His  omission  of  any  mention  of  Titus 
and  of  the  apostle's  inflexible  opposition  in  Jerusalem  to 
the  demand  for  his  circumcision  is  noteworthy  in  this  con- 
nection, and  can  with  difficulty  be  explained  on  any  other 
hypothesis  than  that  of  an  intention  to  disregard  facts 
not  in  accord  with  his  conception  of  Paul's  character  and 
work. 

This  writer's  account  of  the  apostle's  work  as  a  mission- 
ary is  in  fact  hardly  reconcilable  with  the  spirit  and  aim  of 
Paul  as  he  represents  himself  in  the  Epistles.  Not  to 
dwell  upon  the  fact  that,  according  to  Acts,  it  is  not  the 
apostle  to  the  gentiles,  but  Peter,  who  was  the  real  founder 
of  the  mission  to  the  uncircumcised  (Acts  x.  i  f.),  the 
ministry  of  the  former  is  generally  represented  as  primarily 
to  the  Jews.  In  most  cases  his  preaching  to  the  gentiles 
is  set  forth  as  merely  incidental  and  as  occasioned  by  the 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE  EPISTLES  1 59 

hostility  of  the  Jews  to  his  message.  It  is  made  to  appear 
that  the  redoubtable  advocate  of  the  gospel  of  the  uncir- 
cumcision,  who  said  of  himself  that  God  had  revealed  His 
Son  in  him  in  order  that  he  might  preach  the  good  news 
to  the  gentiles  (Gal.  i.  16),  goes  to  them  for  the  reason 
that  his  own  people  reject  and  persecute  him  (Acts  xiii. 
46).  At  an  advanced  period  in  his  ministry  he  is  made  to 
say  to  the  unbelieving  and  blasphemous  Jews  :  '*  Your 
blood  be  upon  your  own  heads  ;  I  am  clean  ;  from  hence- 
forth I  will  go  unto  the  gentiles  "  (xviii.  6).  Yet  repeatedly 
thereafter  he  pursues  the  settled  policy,  "as  was  his  cus- 
tom," of  beginning  his  ministry  at  various  points  in  the 
synagogues.  Some  exceptions  to  this  procedure  are, 
indeed,  to  be  noted  (xiii.  7-12,  xiv.  6,  7,  21,  xvii.  11.  12, 
17-34),  but  in  the  first  instance  Sergius  Paulus  is  only 
incidentally  converted  after  the  synagogue  had  been 
favoured  with  a  ministration.  The  theory  of  the  author  of 
Acts  is  carried  out  with  striking  consistency  and  vigour  to 
the  very  end  of  Paul's  work  as  he  records  it,  so  that  in 
Rome  his  relations  with  the  Jews  are  at  first  unconstrained, 
until,  rejected  by  a  portion  of  them,  he  hurls  at  them  a 
condemnatory  prophecy,  and  declares  that  the  "salvation 
of  God  is  sent  unto  the  gentiles  "  (xxviii.  23-28).  Thus 
the  writer  represents  from  first  to  last  that  the  origin  of 
the  Pauline  gentile  church  is  due  to  the  obstinate  unbelief 
of  the  Jews.  On  the  other  hand,  it  must  be  conceded  that 
Paul  was  profoundly  interested  in  the  conversion  of  his 
"brethren"  to  the  Christian  faith.  But,  according  to  his 
own  declarations  on  the  subject,  the  method  should  have 
been  the  reverse  of  that  pursued  if  the  representation  in 
Acts  is  correct;  for  the  Jews  were  to  be  incited  to  "jeal- 
ousy "  by  the  prior  acceptance  of  the  gospel  on  the  part  of 
the  gentiles,  the  "fulness"  of  whom  was  first  to  be 
brought  in  (Rom.  x.    16-21,  xi.   5,   11-16,  20,  2^,    25-31. 


l60  THE  MISSIONARY 

See  Holtzmann,  ?//  supra,  p.  316).  Single  instances  of 
beginning  his  ministry  first  among  the  Jews  are  not  of 
so  much  importance  as  the  "suspicious  regularity"  (Weiz- 
sacker,  Holtzmann)  of  the  procedure  according  to  Acts, 
where  it  appears  as  a  "  principle  "  of  his  mission  (xiii.  46,  47, 
xviii.  6,  xxviii.  26-28).  On  this  theory  ''the  principal 
difference  between  Paul  and  the  original  apostles  is  that 
he  turned  to  the  gentiles  when  the  Jews  would  not  hear 
him,"  in  direct  contravention  of  the  agreement  reached  in 
Jerusalem  between  him  and  them  (Gal.  ii.  9),  according  to 
which  they  were  to  undertake  the  ministry  to  the  Jews, 
and  he  that  to  the  gentiles. 

For  an  estimate  of  the  two  representations  of  Paul  in 
question,  his  doctrinal  teachings  as  given  in  the  respective 
sources  furnish  important  data.  We  should  expect  to  find 
in  a  history  of  the  apostle,  which  a  considerable  portion  of 
Acts  ostensibly  is,  an  account  of  his  method  of  presenting 
his  peculiar  apprehension  of  Christianity,  or  at  least  speci- 
mens of  his  missionary  preaching  in  which  his  distinctive 
doctrines  would  be  given  emphatic  expression.  It  is  true 
that  some  of  his  speeches  in  Acts  are  apologetic,  and  do 
not  furnish  occasion  for  such  an  exposition.  But  oppor- 
tunities for  it  are  not  wanting,  and  where  they  occur  we 
are  invariably  disappointed  by  the  contrast  between  the 
Epistles  and  the  addresses  in  this  history.  In  Antioch  of 
Pisidia  he  delivered  an  address  to  the  Jews  in  the  syna- 
gogue, in  Athens  to  gentiles,  and  at  Miletus  to  Christians ; 
yet  in  neither  of  these  does  he  go  beyond  the  average 
Jewish-Christian  profession  of  faith, —  the  one  God,  Christ 
the  Messiah,  and  the  resurrection  (xiii.  16-41,  xvii.  22-31, 
XX.  17-35),  just  as  elsewhere  he  testifies  of  repentance 
and  conversion,  and  *'  reasons  of  righteousness  and  tem- 
perance and  the  judgment  to  come"  (xxii.  1-2 1,  xxiv. 
10-21,   xxvi.    2-23).     In   all   the  speeches  of  the   apostle 


PAUL    OF   THE   ACTS   AND    THE  EPISTLES  l6l 

reported  in  Acts,  there  is  little  that  indicates  the  vigorous 
champion  of  the  new  gospel  of  grace  who  has  impressed 
the  stamp  of  his  originality  on  almost  every  page  of  the 
Epistles.  The  Pauline  terminology  is,  indeed,  employed 
in  xiii.  ^g  {SiKatovTai),  but  according  to  Holtzmann  *'this 
passage  presents  instead  of  a  full  Paulinism  in  the  sense 
of  Rom.  i.  17,  vi.  7,  viii.  3  a  negative  conception  of  justifi- 
cation, i.e.  absolution,  and  presupposes  like  Luke  xviii.  14 
that  a  certain  though  unsatisfactory  measure  of  it  is  to  be 
found  as  the  ground  of  the  law."  An  intimation  of  the 
doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  is  contained  in  xvi.  31, 
and  possibly  in  xx.  21;  yet  the  fact  is  significant  with 
reference  to  the  relation  assumed  in  Acts  of  Paul  and  the 
original  apostles  to  Christianity  that,  as  has  been  re- 
peatedly pointed  out,  the  distinctive  "  watchwords "  of 
Paulinism  are  put  into  the  mouth  of  Peter,  who  represents 
himself  as  '' a  good  while  ago"  chosen  of  God  to  preach 
the  gospel  to  the  gentiles  (Acts  xv.  7-11).  But  if  the 
apostles  in  Jerusalem  felt,  as  Peter  here  represents,  that 
the  law  was  "  a  yoke  upon  the  neck  of  the  disciples " 
which  neither  they  nor  their  fathers  "  were  able  to  bear," 
it  is  not  easy  to  see  what  ground  for  controversy  there 
was  between  them  and  Paul.  It  is  precisely  this  contro- 
versy, however,  that  the  writer  of  Acts  is  studious  to 
ignore.  He  may  not,  as  the  older  Tubingen  school  sup- 
posed, have  drawn  the  portraits  of  Peter  and  Paul  with  a 
conscious  "tendency,"  but  may  rather,  perhaps,  as  Dr. 
Pfleiderer  remarks,  have  "  made  Peter  speak  like  an  eccle- 
siastical Jewish  Christian,  and  Paul  like  an  ecclesiastical 
deutero-Paulinist  of  his  own  time.  Because  these  two 
tendencies  had  then  come  so  near  each  other  to  the  point  of 
indistinguishabihty,  it  was  very  natural  that  their  typical 
representatives  should  appear  much  closer  together  than 
they  in  reality  once  stood"  {Das   Urchristenthinny  p.  S^O- 


1 62  THE  MISSIONARY 

The  conference  which  Paul  held  with  the  apostles  in 
Jerusalem  on  his  second  visit  to  that  city  concerning  the 
central  question  of  the  church  at  the  time,  that  of  the 
circumcision  of  the  gentile  converts,  has  already  been 
referred  to  in  the  course  of  the  preceding  discussion. 
The  two  accounts  of  this  event  (Gal.  ii.  i-io.  Acts  xv. 
1-35)  are,  if  not  controlled  by  opposite  aims,  at  least  from 
widely  different  points  of  view.  The  veritable  course  of 
affairs  in  this  conference,  the  attitude  of  Paul  and  of 
*'  those  in  authority  "  {ol  Bofcovvre^)  in  Jerusalem  respect- 
ing the  question  in  debate,  and  the  actual  outcome  of  the 
council,  are  matters  of  the  gravest  importance  for  the  his- 
tory of  apostolic  Christianity.  It  was  not  without  good 
reason  that  the  keen  insight  of  the  great  founder  of  the 
Tubingen  school  saw  in  this  passage  of  Galatians  the  right 
point  of  departure  for  the  critical  study  of  the  literature  of 
the  primitive  church.  The  question,  whether  this  litera- 
ture could  have  been  what  it  is  if  the  account  in  Acts  is 
correct,  must  be  determined  by  a  careful  analysis  of  that 
report,  and  a  comparison  of  its  statements  with  those 
made  by  the  apostle  himself  on  the  subject. 

It  is,  first  of  all,  of  paramount  importance  to  ascertain 
as  nearly  as  possible  Paul's  point  of  view  and  feeling 
respecting  all  that  was  involved  in  the  journey  to  Jeru- 
salem, and  it  will  not  be  denied  by  the  ardent  supporters 
of  the  credibility  of  Acts  that  the  most  trustworthy  source 
for  this  information  is  found  in  his  own  declarations  in 
Galatians.  Now  it  is  manifest  to  the  student  of  the  first 
two  chapters  of  this  Epistle  that  the  apostle  is  concerned 
before  all  with  the  assertion  of  his  independence  of  men, 
especially  of  the  "  pillars  "  in  Jerusalem,  in  all  that  related 
to  his  credentials  as  a  preacher  of  the  new  gospel  to  the 
gentiles  (Gal.  i.  i).  He  also  declares  specifically  that  no 
man  taught  him  this  gospel,  but  that  he  had  it  "  through 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE  EPISTLES  1 63 

revelation  of  Jesus  Christ"  (Gal.  i.  12).  It  is  with  the  one 
end  in  view  of  making  prominent  the  original  character  of 
his  authority  as  an  apostle  that  he  mentions  his  conver- 
sion, wrought  by  God  for  the  sole  purpose  of  sending  him 
to  the  gentiles,  and  emphasises  the  fact  that  he  did  not 
thereupon  go  to  Jerusalem  "  to  them  that  were  apostles 
before  "  him,  but  only  after  three  years,  and  then  solely  to 
visit  Peter,  seeing  no  other  of  the  apostles.  After  having 
disregarded  during  fourteen  years  those  "reputed  to  be 
somewhat "  in  Jerusalem,  and  apparently  shown  himself 
disposed  to  ignore  them  indefinitely  except  in  an  especial 
emergency,  he  went  up  at  length  "by  revelation."  There 
is  no  intimation  in  his  account  that  those  in  authority 
there  had  paid  any  more  attention  to  him  than  he  had  to 
them,  —  that  they  had  molested  him,  or  in  any  way  inter- 
fered with  his  work.  Nothing  is  known  of  the  character 
or  contents  of  the  "revelation,"  but  the  mention  of  it  in 
the  connection  is  important,  as  Weizsacker  has  pointed 
out,*  since  it  indicates,  like  the  "revelation"  of  his  con- 
version, a  consciousness  of  direct  authority  from  above 
and  independence  of  external  constraint.  Whether,  ac- 
cording to  Acts,  he  was  sent  to  Jerusalem  by  the  church 
in  Antioch,  or  no,  is  not  a  matter  of  moment,  but  it  is 
of  the  greatest  consequence  whether  he  went  to  argue  a 
question  which  had  been  discussed  in  that  church,  before 
an  apostolic  tribunal  whose  authority  he  who  "took  not 
counsel  of  flesh  and  blood"  could  recognise  in  the  matter 
in  dispute.  It  is  not  expressly  declared,  but  is  probably 
implied  in  the  account  in  Acts,  that  the  question  of  salva- 
tion without  circumcision  remained  unsettled  after  "no 
small  dissension "  in  the  Antiochian  church,  and  could 
only  be  settled  by  an  appeal  "  to  the  apostles  and  elders  " 
in  Jerusalem.     But  in  view  of  the  spirit  and  feeling  mani- 

*  Jahrbiicher  fiir  deutsche  Theologie^  1873,  p.  195. 


1 64  THE  MISSIONARY 

fested  by  Paul  in  his  account  of  the  affair,  and  of  the 
connection  in  which  he  places  it,  his  acceptance  of  such 
a  mission  is  unthinkable  on  any  just  estimate  of  his  char- 
acter. He  to  whom  the  gospel  of  the  uncircumcision  had 
come  by  "  revelation  of  Jesus  Christ,"  and  who  for  four- 
teen years  had  not  recognised  the  authority  of  "  those 
reputed  to  be  somewhat,"  could  not  thus  have  compro- 
mised himself  even  out  of  deference  to  the  wishes  of  the 
"  brethren  "  in  Antioch.  Had  such  a  humiHating  propo- 
sition been  made  to  him,  could  he  have  let  slip  the  oppor- 
tunity of  declaring  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  his 
indignant  rejection  of  it?  It  is  altogether  unmistakable, 
from  what  he  says  of  the  matter  in  this  Epistle,  that  he 
could  not  have  gone  to  Jerusalem  to  seek  a  human  author- 
isation for  a  gospel  which  he  believed  to  be  divinely 
authenticated  to  him.  His  own  words  comport  well  with 
his  sense  of  dignity  and  authority  :  "  I  went  up  by  revela- 
tion, and  I  laid  before  {aveOe\ir]v)  them  the  gospel  which  I 
preach  among  the  gentiles"  (Gal.  ii.  2).  The  journey  was 
evidently  undertaken  with  the  purpose  of  compelling,  of 
winning  by  a  contest  if  necessary,  the  recognition  of  the 
*'  pillars  "  of  the  church  ;  but  he  does  not  by  a  word  cast 
the  least  doubt  upon  his  own  conviction  of  the  rightness 
of  his  cause,  or  intimate  that  he  could  be  strengthened  in 
his  assurance  of  it  by  anything  that  the  apostles  might 
say.  Probably  a  knowledge  on  his  part  of  a  feeling  hostile 
to  him  in  Jerusalem,  and  of  an  influence  against  him  issu- 
ing thence,  must  be  assumed  as  the  occasion  of  the  expe- 
rience which  he  calls  a  "revelation."  At  any  rate,  he 
went  up  with  the  ** proud  conviction"  that  in  his  gentile 
mission  he  was  not  running  and  had  not  run  '*  in  vain," 
and  that  the  presentation  of  the  matter  to  the  apostles 
would  at  least  secure  him  from  any  further  interference 
with  his  work  on  their  part. 


PAUL    OF   THE   ACTS  AND    THE   EPISTLES  165 

That  the  apostle  did  not  make  this  journey  in  a  spirit  of 
compromise,  or  to  secure  a  "supplementary  authorisation" 
of  his  gospel,  or  to  bring  for  decision  before  a  higher  tri- 
bunal a  question  debated  in  Antioch,  is  apparent  from  the 
fact  that  he  took  with  him  the  uncircumcised  Greek  Titus 
''  as  a  living  example "  of  the  principle  of  his  mission. 
This  circumstance,  the  mention  of  which  did  not  accord 
with  the  purpose  of  the  writer  of  Acts,  he  places  before 
the  Galatians  with  an  unconcealed  pride,  and  adds  that 
he  did  not  yield  for  an  hour  to  the  demand  that  the  Jew- 
ish rite  should  be  performed  upon  his  companion,  "  that 
the  truth  of  the  gospel  might  continue "  with  them 
(Gal.  ii.  5).  He  stakes  the  principle  of  his  mission  on 
this  contest,  which  he  glories  in  having  brought  to  a  vic- 
torious conclusion,  and  which  had  its  chief  significance  for 
him  and  his  cause  on  account  of  ''the  false  brethren  who 
came  in  privily  [among  his  churches]  to  spy  out  their  lib- 
erty." That  Titus  was  not  circumcised  at  all,  whether  by 
compulsion  or  voluntarily,  is  too  evident  from  the  tone  and 
context  of  the  account  to  warrant  discussion.  The  reason 
is  manifest  why  the  writer  of  Acts,  who  records  the  cir- 
cumcision of  Timothy  ''on  account  of  the  Jews,"  should 
have  omitted  mention  of  this  episode  on  which  Paul  lays 
so  much  stress.  It  does  not  accord  with  the  point  of  view 
of  that  book  to  give  prominence  to  any  conflict  between 
Paul  and  the  Jewish-Christian  leaders  in  Jerusalem.  But 
that  a  bitter  conflict  arose  in  the  case  in  question  is  evi- 
dent from  the  sketch  in  Galatians.  That  the  apostle, 
moreover,  regarded  it  as  of  great  importance,  and  as  denot- 
ing a  crisis,  an  epoch,  in  Christian  history,  there  can  be 
no  doubt.  Its  significance  certainly  depends  in  no  small 
degree  upon  the  part  taken  in  it  by  "those  in  authority." 
Paul's  condensed  statement  of  the  matter  leaves  us  in 
uncertainty  on  this   point.     He   doubtless    means   to    be 


1 66  THE  MISSIONARY 

understood  as  declaring  that  a  pressure  was  brought  to 
bear  upon  him  in  Jerusalem  for  the  circumcision  of  Titus. 
The  passage  is  very  difficult,  and  has  received  widely  dif- 
ferent interpretations.  If  we  read  "  on  account  of  the 
false  brethren,"  etc.  {^la  rov<;  Trap.  -^jrevS.),  in  close  con- 
nection with  the  foregoing,  the  sense  may  be  that  the 
demand  was  made  by  reason  of  these  persons,  assumed  to 
be  present  in  Jerusalem  ;  while,  if  we  separate  them  as  in 
the  revised  version,  it  may  be  that  Paul's  attitude  and 
struggle  were  with  reference  to  them  in  his  several 
churches.*  But,  in  any  case,  he  does  not  say  that  ''  the  false 
brethren  "  made  the  demand,  and  he  certainly  could  not 
mean  to  imply  that  he  resisted  the  requirement  because  t/iej/ 
made  it,  as  if  he  would  have  acceded  to  it  under  different 
circumstances.  Whether  he  was  required  by  performing 
the  act  in  question  to  bear  public  testimony  against  his 
gospel  by  the  whole  church  in  Jerusalem,  by  few,  by  many, 
or  by  the  apostles  themselves,  he  does  not  tell  us.  Perhaps 
Lipsius  goes  too  far  in  saying  that  it  results  "  with  cer- 
tainty "  from  the  account  that  the  apostles  at  first  required 
the  circumcision  of  Titus. f  It  is  certain,  however,  that 
the  demand  came  from  a  source  which  Paul  deemed  of  so 
much  importance  as  to  justify  emphatic  mention.  It  is 
also  of  no  little  significance,  as  Weizsacker  has  pointed  out 
(;//  supra,  p.  304),  that  he  gives  as  the  sole  reason  why  the 
requirement  was  not  carried  out  his  own  opposition  to  it, 
and  does  not  intimate  that  he  had  support  in  his  resistance 
from  any  quarter.  The  fact  that  the  pillar-apostles  yielded 
in  the  end  does  not  necessarily  carry  with  it  the  implica- 
tion that  they  did  not  at  first  join  in  making  the  demand. 
Not  only  did  Paul  successfully  resist  the  demand  in  ques- 
tion, but  he  secured  from  the  three  chief  apostles,  Peter, 

*  So  Lipsius  in  Hand-  Com?rieniar,  in  loc. 

t  Article,  "  Apostel-Convent "  in  Schenkel's  Bihel- Lexicon. 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE   EPISTLES  1 6/ 

James,  and  John,  a  recognition  of  his  mission  to  the  gentiles. 
He  does  not  intimate,  however,  that  fellowship  was  extended 
to  him  on  behalf  of  the  whole  church  in  Jerusalem,  or  that 
he  had  that  of  the  other  believers  there.  An  important 
question  arises  here  respecting  the  relation  of  these  three 
men  to  the  rest  of  the  Christian  community  in  the  holy 
city,  in  which  is  involved  the  significance  of  apparently 
ironical  expressions  of  the  apostle's  regarding  the  former. 
If  these  chiefs  did  not  join  in  the  demand  respecting  Titus, 
they  at  least  did  not  prevent  it,  and  were  perhaps  unable 
to  do  so.  From  this  point  of  view,  Paul's  words  with  ref- 
erence to  them,  ''  those  reputed  to  be  somewhat,"  "  what- 
soever they  [once]  were,  it  maketh  no  matter  to  me,"  may 
be  significant  of  the  fact  that  they  were  not  masters  of  the 
situation,  and  could  not  control  their  followers.  On  the 
other  hand,  if  they  favoured  the  requirement,  or  counselled 
his  acquiescence  in  it  for  the  sake  of  harmony,  these  ex- 
pressions may  denote,  in  view  of  his  successful  resistance, 
his  superior  authority  and  his  triumph  over  them.  Another 
question  arises,  which  is  of  still  greater  importance,  because 
it  involves  the  trustworthiness  of  the  account  in  Acts  xv.  : 
Were  the  transactions  in  question  "privately"  conducted 
before  "those  who  were  of  repute,"  or  before  a  veritable 
council  of  "  the  apostles  and  elders  "  }  If  we  leave  without 
discussion  Weizsacker's  opinion  that  the  writer  of  Acts  had 
Galatians  as  a  source  for  his  narrative,  it  is  in  any  case 
evident  that,  besides  omitting  the  account  of  the  strife 
about  Titus,  he  has  given  a  graphic  delineation  of  an  event 
of  which  Paul  gives  no  intimation, — a  formal  council  in 
which  speeches  were  made,  and  a  decree  was  agreed  upon. 
Paul's  statement  is  simply  that  he  went  up  to  Jerusalem, 
and  laid  before  "them"  his  gospel,  "but  privately  before 
them  who  were  of  repute."  The  former  "them"  has  no 
immediate  antecedent,  and  the  probably  correct  interpreta- 


1 68  THE   MISSIONARY 

tion  is  that,  when  he  used  it,  he  had  in  mind  the  apostles, 
but  qualified  it  immediately  by  saying  that  he  meant  only 
those  who  were  recognised  as  their  leaders.  It  is  upon 
this  private  conference  that  he  lays  the  entire  stress,  and 
no  place  can  be  found  in  his  account  (Gal.  ii.  2-10),  without 
the  greatest  violence,  for  such  proceedings  as  those  re- 
corded in  Acts.  The  author  of  this  book,  looking  at  the 
matter  from  the  point  of  view  of  his  time,  could  see  noth- 
ing so  fitting  as  an  ecclesiastical  council,  and  he  accord- 
ingly knew  nothing  of  a  private  transaction,  a  compact  of 
the  chief  apostles  with  Paul,  a  right  hand  of  fellowship. 
The  supposition  of  a  formal  council  encounters  the  diffi- 
culty involved  in  Paul's  silence  about  it.  If  it  was  held 
after  a  private  conference,  which  he  explicitly  mentions,  it 
would  be  significant  as  giving  a  public  sanction  and  author- 
ity to  whatever  compact  was  made  in  the  latter.  Accord- 
ingly, he  could  not  have  omitted  to  give  it  prominence  in 
his  account  of  the  proceedings,  for  to  do  so  would  have 
strengthened  his  position.  It  is  unthinkable  that  in  such 
a  council  the  chief  apostles  should  not  have  been  conspicu- 
ous, and  equally  unthinkable  that  Paul  should  have  said 
nothing  of  their  attitude  and  words.  A  private  conference 
after  the  council  could  have  no  significance  unless  it  were 
held  in  order  to  reverse  the  formal  decree,  in  which  case 
the  latter  would  be  made  a  farce. 

The  attitude  and  relation  of  Paul  toward  the  apostles  in 
Jerusalem,  as  set  forth  in  the  two  accounts,  present  a  con- 
trast which  is  of  no  small  historical  significance.  Accord- 
ing to  Acts,  he  goes  up  as  a  delegate,  along  with  others, 
to  lay  before  an  ecclesiastical  council  the  question  of  the 
circumcision  of  the  gentile  converts,  which  had  been  dis- 
cussed in  Antioch,  where  it  would  appear  that  he  was  not 
himself  recognised  as  an  authority  on  the  subject.  Arrived 
in  Jerusalem,  he  does  not  go  before  his  peers,  the  apostles, 


PAUL    OF   THE  ACTS  AND    THE   EPISTLES  169 

to  defend  his  gospel  and  assert  his  rights  as  one  who,  hav- 
ing "  seen  the  Lord  "  and  had  a  ''  revelation,"  acknowledged 
no  superior  among  them,  but  he  submits  to  present  the 
vital  question  of  his  mission  to  an  assembly  composed  of 
"the  apostles  and  elders,"  according  to  one  statement,  and 
according  to  another,  of  ''the  apostles  and  elders  and  the 
whole  church,"  as  if  the  matter  at  issue  were  one  on  which 
he  could  accept  a  majority  vote  as  decisive.  In  this  council 
he  is  no  conspicuous  figure.  He  has  no  cause  to  argue. 
There  is  no  contest  over  the  question  for  the  defence  of 
which  he  would  have  given  his  heart's  blood.  He  does 
not  appear  as  the  redoubtable  antagonist  of  those  ''reputed 
to  be  somewhat "  for  the  exposition  of  his  gospel  of  liberty 
and  for  the  arraignment  of  those  who  would  bring  his  gen- 
tile converts  into  bondage.  No  words  of  his  are  reported, 
but  he  is  consigned  to  obscurity  with  the  remark  that 
together  with  Barnabas  he  rehearsed  "  what  signs  and 
wonders  God  had  wrought  among  the  gentiles  by  them." 
Finally,  he  meekly  receives  the  decree  of  the  council,  and 
departs  to  publish  it  among  the  gentile  churches.  On  the 
contrary,  according  to  the  account  in  Galatians  Paul  went 
to  Jerusalem,  not  because  he  was  sent  to  appeal  a  case  to 
a  council,  but  by  reason  of  an  inward  intimation  which  he 
regarded  as  a  ''revelation."  He  was  not  "appointed"  to- 
gether with  certain  others,  but  apparently  chose  his  own 
companions,  and  had  the  boldness  to  take  with  him  the 
Greek  Titus  into  the  stronghold  of  the  circumcision.  On 
arriving  there  he  does  not  go  before  an  assemblage  of  the 
church  to  receive  instructions,  but  lays  privately  before  those 
whom  he  regarded  as  his  equals,  not  his  superiors,  the  gos- 
pel which  he  preached  by  direct  divine  authority  among 
the  gentiles.  He  resists  the  demand  for  the  circumcision 
of  Titus,  and  wins  his  cause  alone.  The  result  is  that 
"those  who  were  reputed  to  be  somewhat  "  imparted  noth- 


170  THE   MISSIONARY 

ing  to  him,  but  rather  derived  from  him  the  conviction  that 
he  '*  had  been  intrusted  with  the  gospel  of  the  uncircum- 
cision."  When  about  to  depart  he  receives  no  decree  sat- 
isfactory to  "  the  apostles  and  the  elders  and  the  whole 
church,"  but  the  right  hand  of  fellowship  which  he  had 
won  from  the  pillar-apostles,  accompanied  with  the  request 
that  he  should  remember  the  poor,  a  thing  which  he  "was 
zealous  to  do."  These  two  accounts  are  so  opposed  in  spirit 
and  evident  intention  that  an  inward,  essential  reconciliation 
of  them  is  impossible.  An  external  harmonising  of  them 
appears,  accordingly,  superficial  and  trivial.  The  construc- 
tion of  a  ''composite"  portrait  of  the  Paul  of  history  and 
the  Paul  of  fancy  serves  rather  the  ends  of  amusement 
than  of  instruction. 

That  the  historical  Paul  is  represented  in  the  account  of 
these  events  in  Galatians  is  probable  from  some  circum- 
stance incidental  to  them.  It  is  difficult  to  explain  his 
journey  to  Jerusalem  at  all,  to  find  an  adequate  motive  for 
it,  unless  the  implications  of  it  were  such  as  he  sets  forth. 
He  would  hardly  have  taken  all  the  trouble  of  such  a  jour- 
ney unless  an  object  of  great  moment  were  to  be  achieved. 
This  could  have  been  nothing  less  than  a  conference,  a 
contest,  with  the  chief  apostles.  Why  should  he  go  up  and 
lay  before  them  the  gospel  that  he  preached  if  he  believed 
them  to  be  already  favourable  to  it }  A  subordinate  dis- 
affected party,  which  the  apostles  could  very  well  hold  in 
check  if  they  were  friendly  to  his  cause,  would  hardly  be 
worthy  of  such  an  effort.  Again,  it  will  not  be  disputed 
that  Paul's  account  of  the  affair  with  Titus  is  historical. 
Yet  he  speaks  of  an  influence  brought  to  bear  upon  him 
which  was  of  the  nature  of  an  attempted  compulsion.  A 
pressure  that  he  could  so  designate  could  have  come  only 
from  an  authoritative  source.  Accordingly,  the  presump- 
tion is  very  strong  that  the  apostles  not  only,  as  we  have 


PAUL    OF   THE   ACTS  AND    THE  EPISTLES  I/I 

seen  to  be  probable,  gave  him  no  support  in  this  contest, 
but  also  either  joined  in  the  demand,  or  lent  their  influence 
to  those  who  pressed  it  upon  him.  They  would  have  this 
concession  on  his  part,  until  they  saw  they  could  not  obtain 
it,  as  the  condition  of  the  sort  of  ''fellowship"  which  he 
at  length  gained  as  the  result  of  the  contest.  All  this 
would  have  been  very  improbable,  the  journey  to  Jerusa- 
lem, the  contest,  the  note  of  triumph  in  Galatians,  if  the 
attitude  of  the  apostles  is  correctly  represented  by  the 
speech  of  Peter  at  the  ''council,"  as  reported  in  Acts. 
For  he  is  there  represented  as  saying  not  only  that  he  was 
himself  the  divinely  appointed  agent  of  the  gentile  mission, 
and  that  God  made  no  distinction  between  Jews  and  gen- 
tiles, but  also  that  it  was  a  tempting  of  God  to  require 
circumcision,  and  thus  put  a  yoke  upon  the  neck  of  the 
disciples  which  neither  the  Jewish  fathers  nor  their  de- 
scendants were  able  to  bear.  "  But  we  believe,"  he  de- 
clares, "  that  we  shall  be  saved  through  the  grace  of  our 
Lord  Jesus  "  (xv.  7-1 1).  These  remarks,  which  the  author 
of  Acts  composed  and  put  into  the  mouth  of  the  chief  of 
the  apostles  of  the  circumcision,  contain,  as  far  as  they  go, 
a  confession  of  the  Pauline  faith.  If  they  represent  the 
supposed  council,  and  there  is  no  intimation  of  a  dissenting 
voice,  it  is  difficult  to  see  any  reason  for  Paul's  journey,  or 
how  the  demand  respecting  Titus  could  have  been  made. 
Peter's  subsequent  demeanour  in  Antioch  in  eating  with 
gentiles  furnishes  no  presumption  in  favour  of  his  having 
acknowledged  the  essentials  of  the  Pauline  gospel  in  Jeru- 
salem. In  fact,  his  immediate  retreat  at  the  command 
of  James  shows  that  he  stood  upon  no  liberal  conviction  in 
the  matter.  The  speech  put  into  the  mouth  of  James  is 
even  more  improbable  from  what  we  know  of  him,  and 
both  cannot  be  better  characterised  than  by  saying 
that  they  are  well  adapted  to   the   harmonising  purpose 


172  THE  MISSIONARY 

of  the  writer  of  Acts  or  at  least  to  his  historical  point  of 
view.* 

The  story  of  a  decree  of  a  council  in  Jerusalem  which 
Paul  submitted  to  receive,  and  to  go  about  promulgating 

*  Dr.  McGiffert,  whose  work  on  The  Apostolic  Age  comes  under  the  writer's 
notice  as  this  book  is  going  through  the  press,  expresses  the  opinion  (p.  209) 
that  "  there  is  nothing  improbable  in  the  supposition  that  Peter  and  James 
made  such  addresses  as  are  ascribed  to  them  in  Acts  xv.,"  although  he  casts 
doubt  upon  one-half  of  Peter's  speech.  Apart  from  the  fact  that  the  rejection 
of  a  part  of  the  speech  throws  suspicion  on  the  rest,  and  favours  the  theory 
that  the  whole  of  it  is  a  composition  of  the  writer  of  Acts,  it  should  be  re- 
marked that  the  section,  of  the  genuineness  of  which  Dr.  McGiffert  is  doubtful 
(verses  9  and  10),  is  precisely  that  part  of  it  which  is  important  to  the  question 
that  was  under  discussion.     Peter,  for  example,  is  represented  as  having  said : 

(Vs.  8)   "  And  God  who  knoweth  the  hearts  bare  them  [the  gentiles]  witness, 

giving  them  the  Holy  Ghost,  even  as  he  did  unto  us  ; 
(Vs.  9)   "  And  put  no  difference  between  us  and  them,  purifying  their  hearts 

by  faith. 
(Vs.  10)   "  Now  therefore  why  tempt  ye  God  to  put  a  yoke  upon  the  neck  of 

the  disciples  which  neither  our  fathers  nor  we  were  able  to  bear? 
(Vs.  11)  "  But  we  believe  that  through  the  grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  we 

shall  be  saved  even  as  they." 

The  eighth  verse  contains  only  a  general  declaration  as  to  the  bestowal  of 
the  Spirit,  and  the  eleventh  is  a  confession  of  faith  in  the  Pauline  "  gospel," 
in  accordance  with  the  manifest  purpose  of  the  writer  of  Acts  to  make 
Peter  speak  like  Paul.  But  if  we  allow  the  genuineness  of  these  words,  it  is 
evident  from  Peter's  conduct  at  Antioch  that  he  did  not  interpret  salvation  by 
"  grace  "  in  the  Pauline  sense,  or  he  could  not,  as  Paul  charges,  have  endeav- 
oured to  "  compel  the  gentiles  to  live  as  do  the  Jews"  (Gal.  ii.  14).  Without 
verses  9  and  10  Peter's  speech  is  emptied  of  significance,  and  may  as  well  be 
left  out  of  account  altogether. 

As  to  the  speech  ascribed  to  James,  to  say  nothing  of  the  improbability  of 
its  having  been  reproduced  with  anything  like  accuracy  fifty  years  afterwards, 
together  with  the  long  quotation  from  the  Old  Testament,  the  declaration : 
"My  sentence  is  that  we  trouble  not  them  who  from  among  the  gentiles  are 
turned  unto  God,"  stands  in  direct  opposition  to  the  bitter  "  trouble  "  which 
James  soon  after  prepared  for  the  gentiles  in  Antioch,  when  he  sent  the 
emissaries  to  Peter.  James  appears  in  history  in  a  better  light,  so  far  as 
honesty  is  concerned,  on  the  supposition  that  he  made  no  such  speech  at  the 
council  as  Acts  represents. 


PAUL    OF   THE   ACTS  AND    THE   EPISTLES  173 

among  his  churches,  has  against  it  every  probability  in  the 
case.  It  does  not  at  all  comport  with  the  spirit  of  inde- 
pendence and  the  consciousness  of  an  authority  not  de- 
rived from  men,  that  constitute  the  nerve  of  Paul's  account 
of  the  matter  in  Galatians,  that  he  should  passively  have 
received  such  a  decree,  which  denotes  an  acknowledged 
jurisdiction  of  the  Jerusalem  church  over  the  gentile 
mission.  The  sense  of  his  own  autonomy  is  plainly  im- 
plied in  the  declaration  that  those  who  were  reputed  to 
be  somewhat  imparted  or  communicated  nothing  to  him 
(oL'Sez^  irpoaaveOevro  Gal.  ii.  6),  together  with  a  deprecia- 
tion of  the  authority  which  they  assumed,  or  which  was 
assumed  for  them.  Moreover,  despite  the  fact  that  Paul 
asserts  one  of  the  results  of  the  conference  to  have  been 
that  the  apostles  made  of  him  "only"  the  modest  request 
that  he  should  ''remember  the  poor"  (Gal.  ii.  10),  the 
account  in  Acts  represents  certain  "necessary  things"  to 
have  been  required  in  the  decree,  — Jewish  prescripts  as  to 
food,  abstinence  from  "  things  sacrificed  to  idols,  and  from 
blood  and  from  things  strangled  "  (Acts  xv.  29).  Apart 
from  its  direct  contradiction  of  Paul's  declaration,  the  de- 
cree implies,  as  Weizsacker  remarks,  a  purpose  to  so  regu- 
late the  deportment  of  the  gentile  converts  that  the  Jewish 
Christians  could  associate  with  them.  Yet,  if  such  a 
decree  was  actually  promulgated,  Peter's  subsequent  diffi- 
culty in  Antioch  is  inexplicable, — a  matter  about  which 
Acts  has  for  obvious  reasons  nothing  to  say.  It  is, 
moreover,  irreconcilable  with  the  existence  of  such  a 
decree  that  Paul  nowhere  in  his  Epistles  takes  the  least 
notice  of  it,  particularly  when,  as  in  i  Cor.  viii.  i  f.,  x.  28  f., 
he  discusses  the  question  of  the  eating  of  things  offered 
to  idols.  Here  he  might  very  effectively  have  quoted  the 
decree  of  the  "  council,"  and  could  in  fact  hardly  have 
refrained  from  doing  so,  if  such  a  document  had  been  in 


174 


THE   MISSIONARY 


existence.  But  he  does  not  even  enjoin  the  abstinence  in 
question  on  the  ground  that  the  eating  of  such  things  ih) 
wrong  in  principle,  but  recommends  it  for  the  sake  of  the 
weaker  brethren  who  "  have  not  knowledge."  *  The  decree 
of  the  council  has,  then,  no  historical  basis,  and  with  it 
falls  the  entire  account  in  Acts  of  the  transactions  in 
Jerusalem,  of  the  false  position  of  the  original  apostles, 
the  humiliation  of  Paul,  and  the  distorted  view  of  his 
character  and  mission. 

In  any  case,  however,  even  on  Paul's  own  account  of  it^ 
the  issue  of  the  conference  must  have  been  quite  unsatis- 
factory. In  the  attempt  to  reconcile  irreconcilables,  only 
a  "preliminary  expedient"  was  reached.  The  ''right 
hand  of  fellowship"  had  small  significance.  There  was  a 
division  of  the  work,  and  each  might  go  to  his  own.  But 
neither  party  was  convinced  that  the  other  was  right. 
For  the  original  apostles  to  concede  that  uncircumcised 
gentiles  might  sit  with  Jews  in  the  kingdom,  which  Christ 
was  about  to  establish  at  the  Parousia,  was  in  fact  to 
admit  that  the  rite  was  not  necessary  to  the  latter.  Ac- 
cordingly, the  conjecture  appears  probable  that  this 
matter  was  not  really  determined  in  their  minds  at  all, 
and  that  the  "expedient"  was  "preliminary"  also  in  the 
sense  that  the  Lord  would  settle  that  question  at  his 
coming.  In  the  "right  hand  of  fellowship,"  then,  Paul 
received  recognition  neither  of  the  truth  of  his  gospel  nor 
of  his  own  claim  to  the  apostleship.  The  gospel  of  the 
circumcision  was  still  to  be  preached,  and  Jerusalem  was 

*  Regard  is  had  to  him  that  is  weak  and  to  the  one  who  may  have  indicated 
to  the  believer  that  the  flesh  was  offered  to  idols :  "  For  if  any  man  see  thee 
who  hast  knowledge  sit  at  meat  in  the  idol's  temple,  should  not  the  conscience 
of  him  that  is  weak  be  emboldened  to  eat  those  things  which  are  offered  to 
idols .^"  (i  Cor.  viii.  lo).  Again  he  says:  "If  any  man  say  to  you,  This  is 
offered  in  sacrifice  to  idols,  eat  not  for  his  sake  that  showed  it,  and  for  con- 
science' sake"  (i  Cor.  x.  28). 


PAUL    OF   THE   ACTS  AND    THE   EPISTLES  1 75 

the  centre  to  which  the  gentile  converts  might  send  their 
offerings.  On  Paul's  part,  the  gospel  of  the  apostles  could 
not  be  accepted  as  that  of  Christ,  and  stood  over  against 
his  own  in  irreconcilable  opposition.  He  was  destined  to 
go  his  way  alone,  and  alone  to  contend  and  to  triumph. 
His  cause  prevailed,  because  in  the  nature  of  things  the 
victory  belongs  to  the  spirit  over  the  letter,  to  liberty  over 
bondage,  to  Jesus  over  Judaism. 


PART    III 

THE    TEACHER 


CHAPTER    VIII 

THE    LAW* 

A  KNOWLEDGE  of  Paul's  apprehension  of  the  law, 
his  interpretation  of  it,  and  his  attitude  toward  it, 
is  necessary  to  an  understanding  of  his  thought  and  an 
appreciation  of  his  mission.     His  gospel  to  the  gentiles 

♦The  chapters  in  this  third  part,  which  is  devoted  to  an  elucidation  of  the 
teachings  of  the  apostle,  have  not  been  arranged  in  accordance  with  the  hy- 
pothesis that  his  theological  doctrine  is  to  be  regarded  as  a  system,  the  different 
parts  of  which  can  be  related  to  one  another  under  the  notion  of  dependence 
or  of  development.  He  was,  indeed,  the  first  among  the  followers  of  Jesus  to 
give  to  Christianity  a  theological  or  doctrinal  expression;  but  to  do  this  was 
not  his  primary  purpose.  He  was  before  all  and  essentially  a  missionary,  and 
his  work  as  a  teacher  was  subordinate  to  his  work  as  a  travelling  herald  of  the 
cross.  The  elaboration  of  a  system  of  theology  was  incompatible  with  the  con- 
ditions of  his  activity  and  with  the  circumstances  amidst  which  his  Epistles 
were  written.  These  were  all  writings  of  the  occasion,  called  forth  by  the 
exigencies  of  his  missionary  work,  and  adapted  to  the  needs  of  his  churches. 
In  them,  it  is  true,  are  distinctly  emphasised  the  pivotal  doctrines  of  his 
"gospel":  Christ,  the  Son;  his  death  as  an  atonement  for  sin;  the  mystic 
fellowship  of  the  believer  with  him;  his  resurrection  as  evidence  of  his  divine 
sanction;  the  abolition  of  the  law;  the  new  righteousness  by  faith;  and  the 
Christian's  sonship  of  God,  which  was  to  be  consummated  at  the  early  coming 
of  Jesus  in  his  kingdom  and  glory.  These  cardinal  doctrines,  however,  which 
were  doubtless  the  burden  of  his  preaching  as  a  missionary,  find  in  his  writings 
no  systematic  elaboration,  but  are  presented  according  to  the  requirements  of 
the  occasion,  with  varying  emphasis,  and  with  different  forms  of  expression 
which  sometimes  reveal  the  most  astounding  paradoxes.  The  theory  which 
has  been  advocated  by  some  of  the  apostle's  expositors,  that  his  teaching  reveals 
a  progressive  development,  must  be  taken  with  some  grains  of  allowance.  One 
must  in  particular  be  cautious  about  accepting  the  doctrine  to  which  Dr. 
Matheson  (  The  Spiritual  Development  of  Paul)  unreservedly  commits  himself 
that  Paul  during  many  years  after  his  conversion  was  a  preacher  of  the  circum- 
cision —  an  idea  irreconcilable  with  the  fact  that  he   distinctly  declares  the 

179 


l8o  THE    TEACHER 

was  aggressive  as  toward  the  advocates  of  the  permanent 
vaUdity  of  the  law,  and  no  small  part  of  his  work  con- 
sisted in  a  justification  and  defence  of  his  position  against 
Jewish-Christian  contentions  and  interference.  Hence  his 
theology  was  to  a  large  degree  polemical,  and  was  wrought 
out  in  a  contest  which  turned  upon  this  question  of  the 
law.  His  mission  was  necessarily  an  apology  for  an  atti- 
tude toward  the  traditional  opinions  and  prejudices  of  his 
race,  which  excited  as  much  surprise  and  indignation 
among  his  opponents  as  among  us  it  elicits  admiration  of 
his  courage  and  genius.  The  more  this  limitation  must 
in  the  nature  of  the  case  give  a  temporary  and  transient 
significance  to  much  of  his  thought,  the  more  do  his  occa- 
sional bold  flights  beyond  it  reveal  his  greatness.  If, 
because  he  was  a  Jew,  and  could  not  wholly  free  himself 
from  his  environment,  his  theology  is  in  some  respects 
Jewish,  yet  because  he  was  a  Christian  and  a  thinker  of 
profound  spiritual  insight,  he  gave  the  world  the  gospel  of 
liberty,  and  revealed  the  heights  and  depths  of  universal 
religious  experience.  The  prominence  accorded  to  the 
law  in  his  writings  is  externally  apparent  in  the  circum- 
stance that  the  word  (6  v6\xo^  or  j^o/^to?)  occurs  more  than 
one  hundred  times  in  the  four  great  Epistles.     The  word 

conviction  of  his  call  to  be  the  apostle  to  the  gentiles  to  have  been  one  of  his 
first  experiences  of  the  new  religion.  That  the  exigencies  of  his  mission  may 
have  elicited  differing  forms  of  expression  for  his  fundamental  doctrines 
is  not  improbable;  but  that  they  occasioned  any  modifications  of  the  original 
"  gospel "  which  was  given  in  the  "  revelation  "  of  the  Son  of  God  in  him  is 
not  apparent  from  his  writings,  and  may  be  regarded  as  a  groundless  theory. 
For  the  reason,  then,  that  the  doctrine  of  Paul  is  not  regarded  and  treated  as  a 
system  of  theology,  coherent  and  consistent  throughout,  it  has  been  thought 
expedient  to  place  first  in  this  part  of  the  book  two  chapters  which  contain  an 
elucidation  of  some  words  belonging  to  the  Pauline  terminology,  a  knowledge 
of  which  is  necessary  to  an  understanding  of  his  teachings  —  a  chapter  on  the 
apostle's  use  of  the  term  "  The  Law,"  and  a  chapter  on  the  sense  in  which  he 
employs  the  terms  "  Death,"  "  Life,"  and  "  Salvation." 


THE  LAW  l8l 

is  employed  in  general  (v6/jlo^  with  or  without  the  article) 
of  the  Mosaic  law.  The  attempt  to  establish  a  difference 
in  the  meaning  of  the  word  according  as  the  article  is 
present  or  absent  (Volkmar,  Holsten,  Lightfoot,  and 
Gifford)  has  not  been  successful,  and  it  is  significant  that 
the  two  acutest  investigators,  Holsten  and  Volkmar,  who 
have  undertaken  to  maintain  a  discrimination  of  this  kind 
have  arrived  at  directly  opposite  conclusions.*  Fine  dis- 
tinctions between  the  Mosaic  law  and  law  in  general  are  not 
Pauline.  The  apostle  was  too  much  a  theist  to  recognise 
any  law  that  was  not  God's,  and  too  much  a  Jew  to  discrimi- 
nate in  general  between  God's  law  and  the  Mosaic.  In  Gal. 
iii.  23,  24  he  says,  for  example  :  "  We  were  shut  up  under 
the  law"  (vofjio^  without  the  article);  "wherefore  the  law 
{v6iJLo<;  with  the  article)  was  our  schoolmaster,"  etc.,  where 
the  Mosaic  law  is  in  both  cases  unquestionably  meant. 
Also  in  Rom.  ii.  23-27  the  frequent  recurrence  of  w/-to? 
and  0  z^oyLto?  denotes  no  change  in  the  point  of  view,  which 
is  throughout  that  of  the  Mosaic  law.  In  "breaking  the 
law  "  (roi)  vofjiov)  and  "a  breaking  of  the  law  "  (vofMov)  two 
conceptions  of  "law"  are  not  implied. 

The  law,  then  (v6fjLo<;  or  0  z^o'/xo?),  denotes  in  Paul's  usage 
for  the  most  part  the  law  as  laid  down  in  the  Pentateuch. 
This  was  so  well  understood  by  himself  and  assumed  to  be 
understood  by  the  readers  addressed  that  the  qualification, 
"of  Moses,"  is  not  generally  employed.  Once  he  says: 
"It  is  written  in  the  law  of  Moses"  (i  Cor.  ix.  9),  and 
twice  in  Romans  "the  law  of  God"  is  used  with  reference 
undoubtedly  to  the  same  Old  Testament  legislation  (Rom. 
vii.  22,  viii.  7).  That  the  purely  legislative  portion  of  the 
Pentateuch  is  not  meant  is  evident  from  Gal.  iv.  21-28, 

*  For  a  discussion  of  this  matter  in  detail,  upon  which  it  is  remote  from  the 
purpose  of  this  work  to  enter,  the  student  is  referred  to  Grafe's  monograph, 
Die  panlinische  Lehre  vom  Gesetz,  pp.  2-7. 


1 82  THE    TEACHER 

where  he  asks  those  who 'Mesire  to  be  under  the  law" 
if  they  do  not  ''hear  the  law,"  and  then  quotes  from  the 
historical  part  of  the  so-called  "  Thora  "  or  book  of  the  law, 
a  section  of  the  story  of  Abraham.  Not  only  the  entire 
Pentateuch,  legislative  and  historical,  but  the  whole  Old 
Testament  is  included  under  the  term  'Maw."  In  Rom. 
iii.  19,  after  several  quotations  in  preceding  verses  from 
various  parts  of  the  Old  Testament,  he  refers  to  them  as 
"whatsoever  things  the  law  saith,"  and  in  i  Cor.  xiv.  21 
a  quotation  from  Isaiah  is  introduced  with  the  words  :  "In 
the  law  it  is  written."  The  term  "law"  or  "the  law," 
then,  generally  means  in  Paul's  usage  according  to  the 
connection  the  Mosaic  legislation  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  Mosaic  authorship  of  the  Pentateuch,  the  historical 
portions  of  these  five  books,  or  the  entire  Old  Testament 
revelation,  which  along  with  his  Jewish  contemporaries 
he  regarded  as  the  word  of  the  divine  Spirit.  It  is  doubt- 
ful whether  Grafe  is  justified  in  his  conclusion  that  Paul 
employs  "the  law"  in  "an  extended  signification"  denot- 
ing "the  natural  moral  consciousness  of  the  heathen," 
when  he  says  that  they  "do  by  nature  the  things  con- 
tained in  the  law"  (Rom.  ii.  14)  and  have  "the  work  of 
the  law  written  in  their  hearts."  "The  law"  here  is  only 
that  of  the  Old  Testament  revelation,  and  what  they  have 
"written  in  their  hearts  "  corresponds  to  it.  When  they 
"do  by  nature  the  things  contained  in  the  law,"  they  con- 
form to  the  standard  of  the  written  legislation.  If  they 
are  "a  law  to  themselves,"  it  is  because  in  their  conscience 
is  an  analogon  of  the  Mosaic  law.  The  several  passages 
in  which  "the  law"  denotes  simply  a  norm  or  standard, 
"  law  of  the  mind,"  etc.,  contain  their  own  explanation. 

It  must  also  be  borne  in  mind  that  by  "law"  or  "the 
law"  the  apostle  means  generally  the  entire  Mosaic  legis- 
lation and  the  Old  Testament  revelation  without  making 


THE  LAW  183 

a  distinction  between  the  ritual  and  ethical  portions.  If, 
as  Holsten  maintains,  he  had  regarded  the  ritual  prescripts 
as  no  real  part  of  the  law,  but  only  as  ''  traditions  of  the 
fathers,"  he  could  not  have  been  so  strenuous  with  regard 
to  merely  outward  forms  in  his  polemic  against  Judaism. 
To  him  the  rite  of  circumcision  carried  with  it  the  obliga- 
tion to  keep  "the  whole  law."  It  was,  then,  a  part  of  the 
law,  and  was  not  in  his  thought  discriminated  from  it  as 
one  of  the  "traditions."  As  Grafe  remarks,  the  whole  law 
in  all  its  parts  was  to  him  of  divine  ordination.  This  fact, 
however,  does  not  carry  with  it  the  exclusion  of  such  a  dis- 
crimination as  may  be  made  in  emphasising  now  the  ritual 
and  now  the  ethical  contents  of  the  law.  When  he  says 
that  the  whole  law  is  fulfilled  by  love  (Rom.  xiii.  8,  10)  he 
evidently  refers  to  the  ethical  requirements,  and  to  the 
gentiles  who  have  the  law  written  in  their  hearts,  and  fulfil 
what  the  law  requires  without  written  prescripts,  the  ritual 
prescripts  are  of  course  not  applicable. 

It  is  a  still  greater  error  to  suppose  that  the  apostle  in 
his  depreciation  of  the  law  as  a  means  of  attainino-  rio-ht- 
eousness  and  in  his  demonstration  of  the  futility  of  "  works 
of  the  law  "  had  in  mind  only  the  ritual  and  ceremonial 
prescripts.  The  attempt  to  carry  out  such  a  discrimina- 
tion would  introduce  confusion  into  the  interpretation  of 
his  Epistles,  and  obscure  all  his  teaching.  The  impossi- 
bility of  keeping  the  law  is  emphasised  with  such  intensity, 
and  elaborated  with  so  much  feeling  as  to  denote  unmis- 
takably a  profound  moral  interest.  No  one  can  read 
attentively  the  seventh  chapter  of  Romans  without  receiv- 
ing such  an  impression.  "The  law  is  spiritual,"  he  says, 
"but  I  am  carnal,  sold  under  sin."  "The  commandment 
is  holy  and  just  and  good."  This  he  could  not  have  said 
of  the  ceremonial  law.  On  the  contrary,  he  sets  the  ethi- 
cal prescripts  over  against  the  tendencies  and  impulses  of 


1 84  THE    TEACHER 

the  ''carnal"  man.  The  ''delight  in  the  law  of  God  after 
the  inward  man  "  is  certainly  not  declared  with  reference 
to  anything  but  the  ethical  requirements  of  the  law, 
against  which  the  other  law  of  the  fleshly  nature  contends, 
so  that  the  man  in  whom  the  hopeless  conflict  is  waged 
feels  himself  bound  to  a  "  body  of  death."  The  observ- 
ance of  the  ritual  prescripts  of  the  law  might  indeed  be 
regarded  as  burdensome,  but  Paul  could  not  have  spoken 
of  it  as  an  impossibility,  and  when  he  says  that  every  man 
who  is  circumcised  is  "a  debtor  to  do  the  whole  law" 
(Gal.  V.  3),  he  does  not  mean  the  ritual  part  of  it.  The 
inclusion  of  the  ethical  requirements,  of  the  law  in  the 
general  term,  "the  law,"  is,  moreover,  evident  when  we 
consider  how  much  stress  he  laid  upon  the  matter  of 
attaining  righteousness  by  "the  works  of  the  law."  It  is 
irreconcilable  with  his  depreciation  of  all  ceremonial  forms 
to  suppose  that  he  could  have  connected  them  alone  with 
righteousness,  and  that  by  the  expression,  "justified  by 
the  law,"  he  could  have  meant  justified  by  keeping  the 
outward  prescripts.  One  would  hardly  undertake  to  main- 
tain that  he  attached  no  other  significance  to  the  death  of 
Christ  with  reference  to  the  Old  Testament  economy  than 
that  it  rendered  the  ritual  observances  ineffective.  On 
the  contrary,  when  he  says  that  "if  righteousness  come 
by  the  law  then  Christ  is  dead  in  vain  (Gal.  ii.  21),  he 
evidently  includes  in  the  general  term  all  that  the  ancient 
economy  of  Israel  signified  to  the  Jew.  The  same  inter- 
pretation of  the  term  is  required  in  the  declaration  :  "  I 
had  not  known  sin  but  by  the  law  ;  for  I  had  not  known 
lust,  except  the  law  had  said,  thou  shalt  not  covet " 
(Rom.  vii.  7) ;  and  he  certainly  could  not  have  said  that 
the  ceremonial  law  "was  our  schoolmaster  to  bring  us 
unto  Christ "  (Gal.  iii.  24).  The  antithesis  of  law  and 
grace,  which  runs  through  all  his  theology,  would  be  flat 


THE  LAW  185 

if  not  meaningless,  if  he  intended  to  convey  by  it  only  the 
opposition  of  the  gospel  to  the  Mosaic  ritual,  and  did  not 
rather  set  over  against  each  other  the  two  historic  dispen- 
sations, that  of  the  old  Covenant  and  that  of  the  new 
righteousness  by  faith  (Rom.  vi.  15). 

It  is  only  from  this  point  of  view  that  we  can  rightly 
understand  the  apostle's  conception  of  the  place  of  the  law 
in  the  divine  order,  his  interpretation  of  its  significance. 
His  attitude  toward  it  was  so  directly  and  fundamentally 
opposed  to  that  of  the  Jews  and  the  Jewish  Christians  that 
it  is  no  wonder  that  they  assumed  a  position  of  irreconcila- 
ble antagonism  to  him.  From  their  point  of  view,  which 
was  that  of  all  the  teachers  of  the  Old  Testament,  the  law 
was  given  in  order  to  be  obeyed,  and  because  through 
obedience  to  its  requirements  righteousness  was  attainable. 
This  was  the  ancient  historical  significance  and  object  of 
the  law,  which  underlay  all  the  admonitions  and  exhorta- 
tions of  lawgivers  and  prophets.  Paul  undertook  the  haz- 
ardous task  of  denying  this  hallowed  traditional  doctrine, 
and  set  over  against  it  the  teaching  that  "  by  the  works  of 
the  law  no  flesh  shall  be  justified,"  and  that  a  law  had  not 
been  given  which  could  have  imparted  life,  otherwise  the 
new  plan  of  salvation  through  Christ  would  not  have  been 
devised  (Rom.  iii.  20;  Gal.  ii.  21,  iii.  11,  21).  To  him  the 
old  order  of  the  law  of  works  was  not  simply  overshadowed 
by  the  new  order  of  righteousness  by  grace,  but  it  was 
done  away.  It  came  to  an  "end"  in  Christ  for  "every 
one  that  believeth  "  (Rom.  x.  4).  That  by  "  the  works  of 
the  law  "  he  does  not  mean  mere  legalism,  but  includes  the 
entire  ethical  code  is  evident  from  his  declaration  that 
"the  commandment  was  ordained  to  life,"  and  that  "the 
man  who  doeth  these  things  [keeps  the  requirements  of  the 
law]  shall  live  by  them,"  that  is,  shall  find  "life  "  in  them 
(Rom.  vii.  10,  x.  5  ;   Gal.  iii.  12).     This  he  could  not  have 


1 86  THE    TEACHER 

said  of  the  Mosaic  ritual  prescripts  alone.  He  did  not 
deny  that  the  ethical  precepts  of  the  law,  "the  law"  as  a 
whole  in  fact,  were  intended  to  produce  righteousness,  and 
that  they  might  produce  righteousness  if  observed.  But 
his  .contention  was  that  the  law  would  not  produce  right- 
eousness, because,  on  account  of  the  flesh,  man  could  not 
keep  it.  It  does  not  appear  to  be  a  logical  conclusion  from 
his  theism  and  his  doctrine  that  the  Old  Testament  was  the 
divine  and  authoritative  word  of  the  Spirit,  to  teach  that 
the  law  which  *' was  ordained  to  life  "  was  "found"  by 
him,  Paul,  "  to  be  unto  death,"  that  is,  that  the  result  of  a 
divine  ordinance  was  directly  opposite  to  its  original  inten- 
tion. Such  inconsequences,  however,  show  the  difficulties 
and  the  hazards  of  his  position.  If  we  may  regard  the 
graphic  delineation  of  the  struggles  of  the  natural  man  to 
attain  righteousness  under  the  law  against  the  fatal  ten- 
dencies of  the  flesh  as  a  chapter  out  of  his  own  life  (Rom. 
vii.),  the  opinion  that  his  experience  contributed  to  the 
doctrine  of  the  impossibility  of  this  sort  of  righteousness  is 
well  founded.  He  saw  too  that  Jews  and  gentiles  were  all 
alike  incapable  of  attaining  it,  and  were  "  treasuring  up 
wrath  against  the  day  of  wrath"  (Rom.  ii.  5);  and  as  if 
this  fact  were  not  manifest  enough  to  the  open  eye,  he 
proceeds  to  establish  it  by  a  series  of  citations  from  the 
Old  Testament  to  the  end  that  "every  mouth  may  be 
stopped,  and  all  the  world  may  become  guilty  before  God" 
(Rom.  iii.  10-19).  The  old  order  shows  by  its  results  its 
inadequacy  to  produce  righteousness. 

The  apostle  reached  the  conclusion  that  righteousness 
by  the  works  of  the  law  is  impossible  from  two  points  of 
view,  one  theoretical  and  tine  other  practical.  Theoreti- 
cally he  argues  from  the  premises  of  his  Christology.  If 
Jesus  was  the  Christ,  the  Messiah  of  God,  then  his  mission 
must   have  a  profound    historical  significance.     He  must 


THE  LAW  187 

have  established  a  new  order  of  life,  a  new  righteousness. 
"  The  last  Adam  "  stood  historically  over  against  the  first 
as  the  founder  of  a  new  dispensation.  The  old  order  has, 
then,  no  longer  any  utility.  The  fact  that  another  was  in- 
stituted showed  its  inadequacy.  The  main  argument,  how- 
ever, was  from  the  cross  backward  to  the  law.  Christ's 
death  was  not  an  ignominy,  but  a  glory,  and  its  glory  it  was 
that  it  abolished  the  old  economy  of  the  law  and  sin  and 
death,  and  established  the  new  way  of  grace  and  of  life. 
The  law  was  against  the  whole  race,  and  held  over  them  one 
and  all  its  awful  judgment  of  death  as  the  penalty  for  the 
sins  which  were  accumulating  into  an  appalling  record.  As 
the  representative  of  the  race  Christ  paid  this  penalty  of 
death  once  and  for  all.  As  many  as  have  faith  in  this 
atonement  become  free  from  the  law,  of  which  Christ  is 
''the  end  to  every  one  that  believeth,"  and  are  made  par- 
takers of  the  new  righteousness,  which  is  not  of  works,  but 
of  faith.  This  is  the  doctrinal  kernel  of  the  apostle's  gos- 
pel. As  a  new  philosophy  of  religion  it  had  no  standing 
unless  the  righteousness  ''by  the  works  of  the  law"  were 
null  and  void.  Both  could  not  stand,  and  with  relentless 
logic  he  declared  the  abolition  of  the  old  order.  His 
Christianity  with  its  "glorious  liberty"  was  at  stake.  To 
him,  if  "the  works  of  the  law"  stood,  the  cross  must  go 
down  in  darkness  and  shame.  "  If  righteousness  come  by 
the  law,  then  Christ  is  dead  in  vain  "  (Gal.  ii.  21). 

From  the  practical  side  the  apostle  saw  the  inadequacy 
of  the  law  to  effect  righteousness  in  the  power  of  the  flesh 
as  he  experienced  and  observed  it.  Although  "  the  law  is 
spiritual,"  man  is  "carnal,"  and  through  this  carnality  the 
law  is  found  to  be  "weak."  It  commands,  but  can  furnish 
no  inward  impulse  that  is  able  to  overcome  the  resistance 
of  the  flesh,  so  that  the  result  of  the  unequal  contest  is 
that  "  the  law  in  the  members  warring  against  the  law  of 


1 88  THE    TEACHER 

the  mind"  brings  the  "wretched  man"  ''into  captivity  to 
the  law  of  sin."  "  The  carnal  mind  is  enmity  against  God, 
for  it  is  not  subject  to  the  law  of  God,  neither  indeed  can 
be."  Far  from  being  able  to  deliver  the  carnal  man  from 
the  stress  of  this  conflict,  the  law  rather  conspires  with  the 
flesh  to  effect  his  complete  overthrow.  "The  command- 
ment works  all  manner  of  concupiscence.  For  without  the 
law  sin  was  dead."  "When  we  were  in  the  flesh,  the  mo- 
tions of  sin  zvJiich  zvere  by  the  law,  did  work  in  our  mem- 
bers to  bring  forth  fruit  unto  death  "  (Rom.  vii.  viii.).  On 
this  line  of  argument  the  apostle's  logic  brings  him  to  the 
conclusion  that  the  law,  which  thus  incites  to  sin,  and 
alone  "revives"  it  out  of  its  sleep  of  death,  was  given  for 
this  very  purpose.  We  have  seen  that  he  has  declared  it 
to  have  been  in  its  intention  "  unto  life,"  but  to  have  been 
"found  to  be  unto  death."  Yet  from  the  fact  that  it  pro- 
vokes to  sin,  he  argues  teleologically,  that  is,  from  its 
actual  effect  to  its  intention,  that  it  was  given  for  this  very 
purpose.  He  makes  no  attempt  to  reconcile  these  conflict- 
ing conclusions,  and  betrays  no  consciousness  of  the  con- 
tradiction. "  The  law  entered  that  the  offence  might 
abound"  (Rom.  v.  20).  To  the  question,  "Wherefore 
serveth,  then,  the  law  .?  "  he  answers,  "  It  was  added  for  the 
sake  of  transgressions  "  {tmv  irapa(3dae(x)v  'x^dptv),  in  order 
to  give  to  actions  which  otherwise  would  not  be  formal 
sins  the  character  of  transgressions,  not  to  increase  them, 
not  to  bring  them  to  knowledge,  since  they  must  first  exist 
as  transgressions  before  they  can  be  known  as  such,  and 
least  of  all  to  check  them,  which  is  opposed  to  the  meaning 
of  %a|Oiz/  and  to  the  plain  sense  of  Rom.  v.  20.  "  Where 
there  is  no  law,  there  is  no  transgression,"  and  "  I  had 
not  known  sin  but  by  the  law"  (Rom.  iv.  15,  vii.  7),  are 
passages  which  denote  the  result  of  the  law,  while  in  Rom. 
vii.  13,  the  law  is  the  occasion  of  sin,  and  sin  works  death. 


THE  LAW  189 

Thus  the  law  is   "  found  to  be  unto  death  "   in  the  sense 
that  it  is  the  occasion  of  sin,  whose  penalty  is  death.* 

It  did  not,  however,  suit  the  apostle's  grand  style  of 
thinking  to  leave  the  matter  in  this  merely  individual 
relation.  To  him  the  law  has  also  an  historical  signifi- 
cance in  the  divine  economy.  Not  only  does  it  result  in 
bringing  home  to  every  man  the  conviction  of  his  inability 
to  attain  a  righteousness  by  its  "works,"  a  righteousness 
of  his  own,  but  it  also  has  a  part  in  the  development  of 
God's  plan  of  salvation  for  mankind,  according  to  which 
all  men  were  ''  concluded  under  sin,  that  the  promise  by 
faith  of  Jesus  Christ  might  be  given  to  them  that  believe." 
They  were  "kept  under  the  law,  shut  up  unto  the  faith 
which  should  afterwards  be  revealed";  so  that  "the  law 
was  our  schoolmaster  to  bring  us  unto  Christ,  that  we 
might  be  justified  by  faith"  (Gal.  iii.  22-24).  ''Heirs  of 
God"  men  are,  indeed,  through  faith;  but  "the  heir,  as 
long  as  he  is  a  child,  differeth  nothing  from  a  servant  .  .  . 
but  is  under  tutors  and  governors  until  the  time  appointed 
of  the  father.  Even  so  we,  when  we  were  children,  were 
in  bondage  under  the  elements  of  the  world,"  until  "the 
fulness  of  the  time  was  come,"  when  "God  sent  forth  His 
Son  "  (Gal.  iv.  1-3).  Under  this  bondage  to  the  flesh  and 
the  law  the  "wretched  man"  cries  out  to  be  delivered  from 
"  this  body  of  death "  (Rom.  vii.  24).  "  In  this  sense," 
remarks  Grafe,  "  one  may  ascribe  to  the   law  a  negative 

*  The  distinction  must  be  kept  in  mind  between  sin  as  carnality,  as  a 
tendency  inhering  in  the  flesh  and  entailing  its  consequence,  death,  even 
upon  those  who  did  not,  between  Adam  and  Moses,  sin  against  a  positive 
commandment,  and  sin  as  a  transgression  of  the  law.  Paul  conceived  the 
law  to  have  been  given  because  of  the  former  condition  for  the  sake  of  realis- 
ing the  latter.  It  was  not  the  law,  which  is  "  good,"  he  says,  that  slew  him, 
but  sin  becoming  by  the  law  "  exceedingly  sinful."  Without  this  discrimina- 
tion Dr.  McGiffert's  remark  is  likely  to  be  misleading,  that  the  law  was  given 
"  in  consequence  of  sin."     (  The  Apostolic  Age,  p.  138.) 


1 90  THE    TEACHER 

preparation  for  the  New  Testament  economy  of  grace.  A 
positive  causal  relation  between  law  and  salvation  Paul 
denies  throughout."  In  Rom.  iii.  21  ''the  righteousness 
of  God,"  that  is,  the  righteousness  of  faith  which  belongs 
to  the  new  dispensation,  is  declared  to  be  "  without  the 
law  "  (%«»/ot9  vofjLov),  an  expression  which  excludes  the  law 
from  any  part  in  the  attainment  of  righteousness,  and  which 
is  in  contrast  with  ''  by  the  law  [8m  v6/jlov]  is  the  knowledge 
of  sin  "  in  the  preceding  verse.  In  like  manner  the  apostle 
says  that  *'the  promise  [to  Abraham]  that  he  should  be  the 
heir  of  the  world  "  "was  not  through  the  law,  but  through 
the  righteousness  of  faith  "  (Rom.  iv.  13).  This  temporary 
and  transient  institution  was  destined  to  be  ''done  away," 
to  be  "abolished,"  and  to  find  its  "end  "  in  the  coming  of 
the  new  dispensation  (Rom.  x.  4 ;  2  Cor.  iii,  11,  13,  14). 

In  view  of  these  sweeping  declarations  one  reads  at  first 
with  astonishment  Rom.  iii.  31  :  "Do  we  then  make  void 
the  law  through  faith  .?  God  forbid  ;  yea,  we  establish  the 
law."  This  is  introductory  to  a  proof  that  the  righteous- 
ness by  faith,  that  is,  without  "the  works  of  the  law,"  is 
testified  to  by  the  law  itself.  In  this  demonstration  is 
evident  the  flexibility  of  the  term  "the  law"  in  the  apos- 
tle's usage.  While  in  the  passages  quoted  in  the  preceding 
paragraph  he  plainly  intends  by  the  term  to  denote  the 
law  as  legislation,  that  is,  the  ceremonial  and  ethical  re- 
quirements, with  the  purpose  of  showing  that  by  the  at- 
tempt to  observe  these  the  attainment  of  righteousness  is 
impossible,  he  here  (iii.  31-iv.  25)  proceeds  to  show  from 
"the  law,"  that  is,  from  the  historical  part  of  the  Penta- 
teuch, that  his  position  is  supported  in  the  Old  Testament. 
One  might  suppose  that  a  Jewish  or  a  Jewish-Christian 
logician  would  object  to  this  mode  of  argumentation  as 
an  artful  avoidance  of  the  question  in  debate.  To  the 
apostle,  however,   the  whole   Old   Testament   economy  is 


THE  LAW  191 


''  the  law,"  and  he  appears  to  have  thought  that  he  could 
make   out  his   case   and  ^'establish"  that   which    he  had 
vehemently   rejected   by   a   single    historical    instance   of 
''righteousness  by  faith"  in  the  person  of  a  representative 
Israehte.    Accordingly,  he  appeals  to  the  case  of  Abraham, 
whose  faith  was  accounted  to  him  for  righteousness,  and 
argues  that  the  law  which  came  four  hundred  and  thirty 
years  afterward  could  not  annul  and  make  of  no  effect  the 
promise  which  was  made  to  Abraham,  and  which  "  was  not 
to  him  or  to  his  seed  through  the  law,  but  through  the 
righteousness  of  faith"  (Rom.  iv.  ;  Gal.  iii.)-     To  this  ar- 
gument a  Jew  might  have  answered  that  it  is  a  grasping 
at  words,  and  is  not  based  upon  historical  facts.     In  fact 
the  imputation  of  righteousness  on  account  of  faith  in  the 
Pauline  sense  is  not  implied  in  the  story  of  Abraham,  to 
whom  it  was  simply  reckoned  as  an  evidence  of  his  piety 
that  he  believed   in  God's   promise  that  he  should  have 
a  numerous   posterity   despite   his   old   age  (Gen.   xv.   6). 
Moreover,   that   nothing   is   known  in   this  connection   of 
righteousness  without  works  is  apparent  from  the  fact  that 
the  commandment  is  given  to  Abraham  to  circumcise  him- 
self and  "every  man  child  that  is  born  in  the  house  or 
bought  with  money  of  any  stranger,"  and  that  accordingly 
he  was   circumcised   when   he  was   ninety-nine   years   old 
(Gen.  xvii.    10-27).     According   to   the   Pauline   doctrine 
that  he  who  is  circumcised  "  is  a  debtor  to  do  the  whole 
law"  (Gal.  iv.  3),  Abraham's  righteousness  by  faith  without 
works  is  not  historically  apparent. 

The  law  is  also  shown  to  be  inferior  to  the  promise  to 
Abraham  on  account  of  the  different  way  in  which  it  was 
given.  The  inheritance  was  given  directly  to  Abraham  by 
God  through  His  promise.  The  law,  on  the  other  hand, 
which  was  "added  for  the  sake  of  transgressions,"  "was 
ordained   by  angels  in   the  hand  of   a  mediator."     Then 


192  THE    TEACHER 

follows  the  passage  which  has  been  a  riddle  to  interpreters  : 
*'  Now  a  mediator  is  not  a  mediator  of  one,  but  God  is 
one"  (Gal.  iii.  18-20).  The  idea  evidently  is  that  the 
subordination  of  the  law  to  the  promise  is  shown  in  the 
fact  that  it  was  given  through  a  **  mediator,"  Moses,  who 
stood  between  the  author  of  the  law  and  the  people,  and 
mediated  its  transmission,  while  in  the  giving  of  the  prom- 
ise God,  who  is  one,  acted  as  one,  and  communicated  it 
without  a  mediator  to  Abraham.  The  place  and  function 
of  the  "angels"  in  the  transaction  are,  however,  not  appar- 
ent, unless  the  law  was  conceived  as  given  by  them  to 
Moses.  But  it  is  probable  that  Paul  had  in  mind  Lev. 
xxvi.  46 :  *'  These  are  the  laws  which  the  Lord  made  be- 
tween him  and  the  children  of  Israel  in  Mount  Sinai  by 
the  hand  of  Moses."  It  is  to  be  noted  that  he  does  not 
say  that  God  was  the  author  of  the  law,  yet  we  know  from 
other  passages  that  this  was  his  doctrine.  The  idea  that 
angels  were  the  medium  of  the  giving  of  the  law  appears 
to  have  been  a  current  Jewish  tradition.  We  find  it  in  the 
speech  put  into  the  mouth  of  Stephen  in  Acts  (vii.  53),  in 
Heb.  ii.  2,  and  in  Josephus,  Ant.  xv.  5.  Such  is  the  apos- 
tle's argument ;  but  it  is  not  apparent  how  the  law  becomes 
subordinate  because  it  was  not  communicated  to  the  people 
directly,  but  to  Moses,  their  representative.  In  the  account 
of  the  giving  of  the  law  in  Exodus  nothing  is  said  about 
"  angels  "  having  a  part  in  the  transaction,  but  God  speaks 
directly  to  Moses  amidst  the  most  terrific  accompaniments 
of  solemnity  and  majesty.  In  fact,  Yahweh  would  not 
give  the  law  in  any  other  way  than  through  Moses,  and 
"the  people  and  the  priests"  are  ordered  not  to  "come  up 
unto  Yahweh,"  lest  He  "break  forth  upon  them"  (Ex. 
xix.  24).  Paul  seems  to  have  written  not  with  immediate 
reference  to  the  account  of  the  Sinaitic  legislation  in 
Exodus,  but  rather  with  the  Jewish  tradition  about  the  law 


THE  LAW  193 

as  **  ordained  by  angels  "  before  his  mind.  His  interpreta- 
tion from  the  point  of  view  of  the  Old  Testament  narrative 
of  the  giving  of  the  law  is  altogether  fanciful  and  super- 
ficial. 

The  apostle  undertakes  to  show  by  another  reference  to 
the  giving  of  the  law  through  Moses  that  it  was  of  a  tran- 
sitory character.  ''The  children  of  Israel,"  he  says,  ''could 
not  steadfastly  behold  the  face  of  Moses  for  the  glory  of 
his  countenance,  which  glory  was  to  be  done  away."  He 
argues  that  "if  that  which  is  done  away  was  glorious," 
"  that  which  remaineth  "  is  much  more  glorious.  Accord- 
ingly, he  says,  "  we  use  great  plainness  of  speech ;  and  not 
as  Moses,  who  put  a  veil  over  his  face,  that  the  children  of 
Israel  could  not  look  steadfastly  to  the  end  of  that  which 
is  abolished"  (2  Cor.  iii.  7,  11-13).  There  is  no  intima- 
tion, however,  in  the  narrative  referred  to  (Ex.  xxxiv. 
33-35)  that  Moses  veiled  his  face  in  order  to  conceal  from 
the  people  whom  he  represented  the  fading  away  of  the 
"glory,"  or  that  the  people  could  not  look  upon  his  face 
because  of  its  splendour.  On  the  contrary  the  writer  says 
that  they  saw  the  face  of  Moses,  that  it  shone,  and  that  he 
spoke  to  them  in  this  condition,  being  himself  ignorant  of 
it  (verses  29-32).  Paul  appears  to  have  understood  that 
Moses,  conscious  that  the  light  on  his  face  faded  away, 
put  on  a  veil,  in  order  that  the  people  should  not  interpret 
this  waning  of  the  "glory"  as  a  symbol  of  the  transient 
character  of  the  law.  The  Old  Testament  writer  does  not 
seem  to  have  thought  of  this,  and  it  did  not  occur  to  him 
to  represent  the  great  lawgiver  as  capable  of  coming  forth 
from  the  presence  of  Yahweh  and  deceiving  the  people  'as 
to  the  nature  of  the  sacred  legislation. 

Paul  appears  to  have  recognised  the  fact  that  his 
doctrine  of  the  abolition  of  the  law  had  its  ethical  perils. 
This  freedom  in  Christ  from  obligation  to  the  law  might 
o 


194  ^'^^^    TEACHER 

be  abused  in  the  interest  of  license.  That  his  opponents 
made  the  most  of  this  is  apparent  from  his  attempts  to 
parry  the  objection.  *'  But  if,"  he  asks,  ''while  we  seek  to 
be  justified  by  Christ,  we  ourselves  also  are  found  sinners, 
is  therefore  Christ  the  minister  of  sin  }  God  forbid"  (Gal. 
ii.  17).  This  is  the  ethical  side  of  his  contest  with  the 
Jewish  Christians ;  and  that  such  a  conflict  of  opinion 
existed  is  evident  not  only  from  occasional  references  to  it 
in  his  Epistles,  but  from  the  fact  of  the  constant  opposi- 
tion to  which  he  was  exposed.  His  teaching  that  the  law 
was  given  to  increase  transgression  in  order  that  grace 
might  the  more  abound  (Rom.  v.  20,  21)  was  met  with 
the  derisive  answer,  ''The  more  sin,  then,  the  more  grace." 
Accordingly,  the  apostle  declares  the  damnation  of  those 
men  to  be  just  who  "slanderously  report"  him  to  say, 
"Let  us  do  evil  that  good  may  come"  (Rom.  iii.  8). 
Again  he  asks,  "  What  shall  we  say  then,  shall  we  continue 
in  sin  that  grace  may  abound"  (Rom.  vi.  i).'*  Jewish- 
Christian  opposition  and  misinterpretation  did  not,  how- 
ever, deter  him  from  the  bold  assertion  and  defence  of  the 
doctrine  that  liberty  in  Christ  meant  unqualifiedly  deliver- 
ance from  the  law  as  the  rule  of  life.  He  could  not 
logically  take  any  other  ground;  for  if  "Christ  was  the 
end  of  the  law  to  every  one  that  believeth,"  then  the  law  is 
no  longer  the  standard  or  rule  of  life  for  believers.  With- 
out this  practical  application  his  entire  contention  would 
have  been  a  mere  strife  about  words.  The  fundamental 
proposition  is  that  "  where  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  [Christ] 
is,  there  is  liberty"  (2  Cor.  iii.  17).  This  liberty  is 
deliverance  from  the  law  —  a  doctrine  which  is  laid  down 
in  unmistakable  terms  in  the  declaration  that,  "  if  ye  be 
led  by  the  Spirit,  ye  are  not  under  the  law"  (Gal.  v.  18). 

The  law  was  conceived  as  adapted  only  to  the  natural, 
carnal  man,  and  served  the  purpose  of  making  the  offence 


THE   LAW  195 

"abound"  which  was  stimulated  by  the  flesh.  The 
Christian,  being  the  possessor  of  the  Spirit,  was  exalted 
above  the  law  and  lived  in  a  higher  realm.  "  They  that 
are  Christ's  have  crucified  the  flesh,  with  the  affections  and 
lusts"  (Gal.  V.  24),  and  have  now  no  longer  any  practical 
relation  to  the  law,  which  binds  the  carnal  man  with  chains 
of  steel.  The  exhortation  to  them  is  :  "  If  we  live  in  the 
Spirit,  let  us  also  walk  in  the  Spirit"  (Gal.  v.  25),  They 
are  ''dead  to  the  law,"  that  they  may  "live  unto  God" 
(Gal.  ii.  19).  Accordingly,  the  apostle  writes  to  the 
Romans  :  "  Now  are  we  delivered  from  the  law,  that  being 
dead  wherein  we  were  held,  that  we  should  serve  in  new- 
ness of  Spirit  and  not  in  oldness  of  the  letter  "  (Rom.  vii. 
6),  that  is,  in  the  new  condition  of  being  impelled  by  the 
Holy  Spirit,  in  opposition  to  the  bondage  of  the  law.  He 
who  is  led  by  the  Spirit  is  a  son  of  God  (Rom.  viii.  14), 
and  owes  allegiance  to  no  law  but  "the  law  of  the  Spirit  of 
life  in  Christ  Jesus"  (Rom.  viii.  2).  Although  the  ancient 
ordinances  may  be  "spiritual"  and  "holy  and  just  and 
good,"  the  Spirit  is  supreme,  and  has  its  own  law.  He 
who  possesses  it  is  no  longer  in  "bondage"  to  old 
ordinances  and  dispensations,  but  is  driven  by  it  whither- 
soever it  "  listeth."  *  That  this  was  not  conceived  as  a 
condition  of  moral  indifference  and  laxity,  but  of  the 
highest  ethical-spiritual  life,  is  manifest,  and  the  apostle 
very  naturally  repudiated  with  indignation  the  charge  that 
his  doctrine  contained  a  principle  of  license.  The  "sons 
of  God,"  "led  by  the  Spirit,"  or  impelled  by  this  super- 
natural agency,  cannot  go  astray.  Under  the  law  a  man 
painfully  produced  only  "works,"  and  of  these  not  enough 

*  "  Wer  darf  mir  Halt  gebieten?     Wer  dem  Geist 

Vorschreiben  der  mich  flihrt?     Der  Pfeil  muss  fliegen 
Wohin  die  Hand  ihn  seines  Schiitzen  treibt." 

—  Schiller,  Jungfrau  von  Orleans,  ii.  4. 


196  THE    TEACHER 

to  effect  righteousness.  In  the  Spirit  he  bears  ''fruits," 
against  which  the  law  can  make  no  complaint  (Gal.  v.  22, 
23).  This  doctrine  undoubtedly  has  its  ethical  perils,  and 
to  Paul's  opponents  it  must  be  granted  that  they  were  not 
altogether  wrong.  There  is  wanting  a  test  of  the  actual 
possession  of  "the  Spirit,"  and  the  ordinary  man,  puffed 
up  with  sense  of  an  inward  illumination,  may  sin  against 
all  laws  human  and  divine. 

The  moral  hazards  of  this  teaching  have  doubtless 
furnished  the  motive  of  the  contention  on  the  part  of  some 
expositors  that  Paul  had  in  view  only  the  abolition  of  the 
ceremonial  law.  This  position  has  an  apparent  support  in 
passages  in  which  he  speaks  of  love  as  the  fulfilling  of  the 
law,  mentioning  once  a  portion  of  the  decalogue  (Gal.  v. 
14;  Rom.  xiii.  9,  10),  and  particularly  in  the  words: 
"That  the  righteousness  of  the  law  might  be  fulfilled  in  us 
who  walk  not  after  the  flesh,  but  after  the  Spirit"  (Rom. 
viii.  4).  It  should  be  borne  in  mind,  however,  that  when 
Paul  addresses  Christians,  he  speaks  to  them  as  not 
''under  the  law,"  but  "under  grace."  He  did  not  regard 
love  as  one  of  "the  works  of  the  law,"  and  it  would  be  a 
denial  of  one  of  the  fundamental  tenets  of  his  theology  to 
maintain  that  he  thought  it  could  be  produced  and  prac- 
tised under  the  law.  If  it  is  the  fulfilment  of  the  law,  it 
includes  all  righteousness  ;  and  he  explicitly  declares  that 
"if  righteousness  come  by  the  law,  Christ  is  dead  in  vain," 
and  that  "  if  there  had  been  a  law  given  which  could  have 
given  life,  verily  righteousness  should  have  been  by  the 
law"  (Gal.  ii.  21,  iii.  21).  On  the  contrary,  to  him  love  is 
one  of  "the  fruits  of  the  Spirit"  (Gal.  v.  22).  It  is  not 
conceived  as  a  matter  of  obedience,  but  as  a  product,  a 
"fruit,"  of  the  indwelling  Spirit.  Rom.  viii.  4  must  be 
interpreted  from  the  same  point  of  view.  "  The  righteous- 
ness of  the  law  "  is  accomplished  in  the  believer  not  by  his 


THE   LAW  197 

"works,"  but  by  the  power  of  ''the  Spirit."  All  that  is 
vital  in  the  law  the  Spirit  impels  its  possessor  to  do,  for 
there  is  no  essential  difference  between  the  law,  which  was 
given  by  the  Spirit,  and  the  rule  of  life  which  the  Spirit 
fulfils  in  him  in  whom  it  resides.  But  the  two  kinds  of 
life  are  separated  "by  the  whole  diameter  of  being,"  and 
what  is  brought  forth  in  him  who  is  "  under  grace  "  is  pre- 
cisely that  which  "the  law  could  not  do"  (Rom.  viii.  3). 
The  law  is  "the  ministration  of  death,"  "the  letter"  that 
"killeth  "  (2  Cor.  iii.  6,  7),  not  because  its  contents  are  not 
"spiritual,"  but  because  it  is  simply  a  law,  a  letter,  com- 
manding and  threatening  and  punishing  with  death,  an 
external  authority  furnishing  no  inward  quickening.*  But 
the  Spirit  is  a  productive  power  which  dwells  within 
(i  Cor.  iii.  16,  vi.  19;  2  Cor.  i.  22),  and  "sheds  abroad  the 
love  of  God  in  the  heart"  (Rom.  v.  5).  Through  this, 
which  "helpeth  our  infirmities,"  are  freedom,  spontaneity, 
and  life. 

If  despite  this  repudiation  of  the  law  the  apostle  says 
that  "the  doers  of  the  law  are  justified,"  and  admits  that 
gentiles  without  a  written  code  may  "do  the  things  con- 
tained in  the  law"  (Rom.  ii.  13,  14;  see  also  verses  26,  27), 
it  should  be  borne  in  mind  that  in  these  passages  he  does 
not  appear  to  deny  that  in  rare  cases  it  might  be  kept,  and 
that  he  who  kept  it  was  completely  justified.  Yet  the 
absolute  declaration  that  "by  the  works  of  the  law  shall  no 
flesh  be  justified"  is  not  reconcilable  with  that  concession. 

*  In  view  of  the  estimate  of  the  law  given  in  Romans,  the  teaching  that  it 
is  "  spiritual,"  "  holy,  just,  and  good,"  and  of  the  declaration  that  "  the  doers 
of  the  law  shall  be  justified"  (Rom.  ii.  13),  the  following  words  from  Dr. 
Matheson  {The  Spiritual  Development  of  Paul,  p.  98)  are  plainly  a  mis- 
interpretation of  the  apostle  :  "  Paul  felt  that  a  man  might  be  legally  blameless 
and  a  deep-ciyed  sinner  still.  He  felt  that  he  might  keep  the  law  without  even 
offending  in  a  single  point,  and  yet  be  at  that  moment  in  the  gall  of  bitterness 
and  the  bonds  of  iniquity." 


198  THE    TEACHER 

Perhaps  Rom.  ii.  13  may  be  regarded  as  conditional  in  the 
sense,  "if  any  are  doers  of  the  law,"  as  verses  25,  26,  and  27 
certainly  are.  It  should  be  said  besides  that  the  points  of 
view  from  which  the  law  is  judged  in  Galatians  and  in 
Romans  are  not  altogether  accordant.  The  characterisa- 
tion of  the  lapse  of  the  Galatians  to  the  observance  of  the 
law  as  a  return  to  "the  weak  and  beggarly  elements  of 
the  world,"  hardly  agrees  with  the  declaration  in  Romans 
that  the  law  is  "spiritual"  (Gal.  iv.  3,  9;  Rom.  vii.  14). 
Some  allowance  must  undoubtedly  be  made  for  the  cir- 
cumstances under  which  the  two  Epistles  were  written, 
the  readers,  and  the  objects  in  view.  Moreover,  apparent 
and  real  inconsistencies  will  not  trouble  the  student  of 
Paul  who  bears  in  mind  that  he  is  not  reading  a  systematic 
theologian,  but  a  man  whose  temperament  and  special 
dogmatic  or  practical  purpose  are  always  to  be  considered. 
Finally,  the  recognition  of  the  fact  that  the  apostle's 
attitude  toward  the  law  was  that  of  an  extremist  whose 
method  was  uncompromising,  and  whose  judgments  were 
harsh,  will  lead  to  a  fair  estimate  of  the  position  of  his 
opponents.  They  could  plead  both  the  spirit  and  the 
letter  of  the  Old  Testament,  and  might  well  maintain  that 
the  doctrine  that  the  law  was  not  given  to  effect  righteous- 
ness, but  to  make  sin  abound,  was  a  perversion  and  a  false 
judgment  of  the  whole  economy.  The  difficulties  and 
hazards  of  Paul's  contention  are  manifest  in  the  proposi- 
tions that  the  law  was  given  to  produce  "life,"  and  that  it 
was  "a  ministration  of  death,"  in  the  attempt  to  reject  the 
law  as  a  way  of  righteousness  by  an  appeal  to  the  law 
itself,  and  in  the  strained  and  artificial  interpretation  by 
which  he  sought  to  support  his  argument  from  the  case  of 
Abraham's  righteousness  by  faith,  from  the  ordaining  of 
the  law  through  "  angels,"  and  from  the  veil  over  the  face 
of  Moses. 


CHAPTER    IX 

THE   PAULINE  TERMS,  "DEATH,"   "LIFE,"  AND   "SALVATION" 

THE  terras  "  Death,"  "  Life,"  and  "  Salvation  "  are  of  so 
much  importance  in  the  doctrine  of  Paul  as  to  war- 
rant a  detailed  consideration  of  them  in  connection  with 
an  exposition  of  his  thought.  The  first  may  be  regarded 
as  set  over  against  the  other  two  in  an  opposition  which 
can  be  removed  only  by  the  triumph  of  the  powers  of 
goodness.  Two  great  dispensations  of  the  divine  economy 
are  accordingly  represented  by  these  terms  —  the  dispen- 
sation of  sin  and  its  consequences,  at  the  head  of  which 
was  the  progenitor  of  the  human  race,  Adam,  and  the  dis- 
pensation of  redemption,  whose  great  Head  was  the  Lord 
from  heaven,  the  last  Adam,  Christ.  The  first  Adam  was 
simply  the  progenitor  of  physical  life,  ''became  a  living 
soul"  (-v/^fx^),  was  "of  the  earth,  earthy,"  and  in  the  pro- 
gressive order  according  to  which  the  lower  form  of  exist- 
ence precedes  the  higher  he  was  only  "natural"  (-v/ru;)^t/co9). 
The  last  Adam,  however,  became  a  life-giving  Spirit.  He 
was  from  heaven,  and,  "  as  we  have  borne  the  image  of  the 
earthly,"  Paul  says  to  the  believers,  "so  also  shall  we  bear 
the  image  of  the  heavenly."  If  by  the  first  Adam  death 
came  into  the  world,  by  the  last  Adam  came  "the  resur- 
rection of  the  dead"  (i  Cor.  xv.  21,  45-49).  The  drama 
of  human  existence  is  thus  conceived  as  a  conflict  between 
these  opposing  powers.  Against  the  "god  of  this  world" 
and  all  the  forces  of  dissolution  and  destruction  is  arrayed 
the  divine  Son  with  his  great  atonement  and  his  revelation 
of  grace,  and  the  destiny  of  each  individual  is  decided  ac- 

199 


200  THE    TEACHER 

cording  as  he  shall  through  faith  appropriate  the  life-giving 
Spirit,  or  remain  in  bondage  to  *'the  law  of  sin  and  death" 
(Rom.  iii.  28,  vi.  ii,  viii.  2). 

The  meaning  of  the  term  "  Death  "  (ddvaro^i)  in  Paul's 
theology  has  been  the  subject  of  no  httle  discussion,  and 
an  "examination  of  the  principal  passages  in  his  Epistles  in 
which  it  occurs  is  necessary  in  order  to  determine  its 
sense.  The  doctrine  that  death  is  the  consequence  of  sin, 
a  result  following  according  to  the  relation  of  cause  and 
effect,  is  laid  down  by  the  apostle  with  an  explicitness 
which  leaves  no  doubt  as  to  his  meaning.  In  Rom.  v. 
12-14  the  introduction  of  this  dread  power  into  the  world 
is  attributed  to  the  transgression  of  Adam,  the  apostle  of 
course  assuming  the  literal  truth  of  the  story  of  Eden. 
Accordingly,  he  says:  "Therefore,  as  through  one  man  sin 
entered  into  the  world,  and  death  through  sin,  and  so  death 
passed  unto  all  men,  for  that  all  sinned;  for  until  the  law 
sin  was  in  the  world,  but  sin  is  not  imputed  when  there  is 
no  law.  Nevertheless,  death  reigned  from  Adam  to  Moses 
even  over  those  who  had  not  sinned  after  the  likeness  of 
Adam's  transgression."  Here  the  meaning  evidently  is 
that  in  the  divine  order  of  human  existence  death  is  the 
inevitable  consequence  of  sin,  and  that  its  sway  in  the 
world  originated  in  the  first  transgression  in  Eden.  Since 
that  event  its  reign  has  continued  over  all  men,  inasmuch 
as  all  have  sinned,  whether  like  Adam  in  violation  of  an 
express  commandment  or  otherwise. 

Attention  has  been  called  in  a  preceding  chapter  to  the 
influence  of  Paul's  environment  upon  his  thought ;  and  it 
is  of  interest  in  this  connection  to  note  that  a  doctrine 
similar  to  this  appears  in  the  Jewish  theology,  the  docu- 
ments of  which  are,  indeed,  much  later,  but  the  substantial 
contents  of  which  very  likely  existed  in  his  time.  Weber 
declares  it  to  have  been  a  capital  and  fundamental  idea  of 


DEATH,    LIFE,   AND   SALVATION  201 

the  Synagogue  that  death  was  caused  by  Adam's  fall,  and 
has  since  reigned  in  the  world,  and  will  reign  until  the 
Messiah  removes  it.*  To  the  question  of  the  angel  why 
the  first  Adam  died  the  answer  is  given  :  "Because  he  did 
not  keep  my  commandments."  Likewise  in  the  Wisdom 
of  Solomon  it  is  declared  that  *'  God  created  man^or 
immortality,  and  made  him  to  be  an  image  of  His  own 
being,  but  through  the  envy  of  the  devil  death  came  into 
the  world"  (i.  13  ff.  ii.  23).  Also  in  Sirach  xxv.  23  it  is  said 
that  "of  the  woman  came  the  beginning  of  sin,  and  through 
her  we  all  die."  The  apostle's  doctrine  that  "in  Adam  all 
die"  is  so  closely  related  to  these  sayings  as  to  indicate 
its  origin  in  the  current  Jewish  thought. 

That  the  Odvaro^  of  Rom.  v.  12  is  primarily  physical 
death  there  can  be  no  doubt,  not  only  on  account  of  the 
analogy  of  the  Jewish  theology,  but  also  because  the  word 
is  employed  without  any  indication  that  other  than  its 
literal  sense  is  intended.  The  contrast  of  "justification  of 
life"  in  which  the  word  is  placed  in  verse  18  does  not 
invalidate  this  interpretation  of  it,  since,  as  will  be  shown 
later,  the  prevailing  Pauline  conception  of  "life"  is  that  of 
a  transfigured  corporeity  not  subject  to  death.  In  verses 
13  f.  Paul  proceeds  to  establish  the  doctrine  that  the  death 
of  all  men  is  consequent  upon  Adam's  sin  by  arguing  that 
"death  reigned  from  Adam  until  Moses,"  through  whom 
the  law  was  given,  even  over  those  who  had  not  sinned, 
as  the  progenitor  did,  against  an  express  commandment, 
doubtless  on  the  ground  that  those  who  "have  sinned 
without  law  shall  also,  perish  without  law"  (Rom.  ii.  12); 
although  the  declaration  that  "sin  is  not  imputed  where 
there  is  no  law"  (Rom.  v.  13)  is  irreconcilable  with  this 
"reign"  of  its  penalty  "from  Adam  to  Moses." 

That  Paul's  doctrine  of  death  as  the  penalty  of  sin  has 

*  System  der  altsyn.  pal'dstin.  TheoL,  p.  238. 


202  THE    TEACHER 

its  roots  in  the  Old  Testament  as  well  as  in  the  Jewish 
theology  is  evident  from  Gen.  ii.  17,  where  death  is  threat- 
ened in  connection  with  the  prohibition  of  the  fruit  of  the 
tree  of  the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil.  Yet  i  Cor.  xv.  47, 
"The  first  man  is  of  the  earth,  earthy,"  doubtless  implies 
the  natural  mortality  of  Adam  and  consequently  of  his 
descendants.  The  first  man  as  "natural"  {ylru)(^L/c6<;)  must 
according  to  the  analogy  of  the  apostle's  teaching  be  re- 
garded as  subject  to  death,  since  "life"  and  "  incorruption  " 
belong  only  to  those  who  through  Christ,  the  "  life-giving- 
Spirit,"  have  entered  into  a  supernatural  relation  to  God 
(Rom.  vi.  8,  viii.  11),  or  have  received  the  adoption  as  sons 
(Rom.  viii.  14-17;  Gal.  iii.  26,  iv.  5-7).  That  the  death  in 
question  is  primarily  that  of  the  body  is  evident  from  the 
declaration  that  "he  that  is  dead  is  justified  from  sin" 
(Rom.  vi.  7).  This  doctrine  of  the  Jewish  theology  that 
"  all  the  dead  are  atoned  by  death  "  (Weber,  System,  etc. 
p.  311)  is  here  applied  by  the  apostle  as  a  proof  of  the 
teaching  that  those  who  have  died  symbolically  with  Christ 
in  baptism  are  freed  from  sin,  having  died  to  it,  since 
Christ's  representative  satisfaction  of  the  law,  the  payment 
of  its  penalty  on  the  cross  for  the  race  as  its  Head  in  the 
new  order  of  "life,"  is  available  for  all  who  through  faith 
and  baptism  come  into  mystic  fellowship  with  his  passion. 
The  conclusion  must  not  be  drawn,  however,  that  he  taught 
the  certain  resurrection  of  all  men  to  life ;  for  according 
to  the  Pauline  theology  only  those  would  rise  at  the  second 
coming  of  Christ  (the  Parousia)  who  in  their  lifetime  had 
come  into  spiritual  union  with  Jesus,  who  having  "died  to 
sin  "  for  all  received  those  alone  into  the  fellowship  of  his 
resurrection  who  had  become  "members"  of  him.  Those 
who  died  without  thus  possessing  the  Spirit,  which  is  the 
"earnest"  of  the  resurrection,  paid  the  penalty  of  sin  by 
dying  absolutely,   that   is,   without   hope   of   living   again 


DEATH,   LIFE,   AND   SALVATION  203 

(i  Cor.  i.  18 ;  2  Cor.  ii.  15;  Rom.  viii.  11,23;  i  Thess.  v.  3). 
This  sense  of  ''death  "  is  apparent  in  the  passage  :  "Yield 
yourselves  unto  God  as  those  who  are  alive  from  the  dead  " 
(Rom.  vi.  13),  where  the  condition  of  subjection  to  death  or 
to  **  perishing"  in  exclusion  from  the  resurrection  is  con- 
ceived as  that  of  all  men  who  have  not  come  into  spiritual 
fellowship  with  Christ.  This  is  apparent  from  verses  21 
and  23,  where  the  "end"  of  their  former  mode  of  life  and 
"the  wages  of  sin"  are  declared  to  be  "death."  To  be 
"alive  from  the  dead"  is  to  pass  from  the  condition  in 
which  "sin  reigns  in  the  mortal  body  "  (verse  12),  and  with 
sin  its  consequence,  death,  into  that  of  "life,"  which  is  that 
of  those  in  whom  the  Spirit  abides  that  insures  the  final 
overcoming  of  death,  the  quickening  of  the  mortal  body 
(Rom.  viii.  11),  or  the  resurrection  at  the  Parousia. 

A  similar  anticipation  of  death  occurs  in  Rom.  viii.  10, 
where  the  apostle  says  to  his  readers  that  if  Christ  is  in 
them  the  body  is  dead  because  of  sin,  but  the  Spirit  is  life 
because  of  righteousness.  Here  the  actually  accomplished 
death  of  the  body  is  of  course  not  meant,  but  its  condition 
of  subjection  to  death  because  of  sin  whose  "wages"  it 
is  —  a  condition  from  which  he  hastens  to  say  it  will  be 
delivered  through  the  Spirit  that  dwelleth  in  them.  An 
analogous  application  of  the  idea  of  dying  occurs  in  Rom. 
vii.  9,  "  And  I  was  alive  apart  from  the  law  once,  but  when 
the  commandment  came,  sin  revived,  and  I  died  ;  and  the 
commandment  which  was  unto  life  I  found  to  be  unto 
death."  The  human  race,  for  whom  Paul  is  here  speak- 
ing, since  he  could  not  himself  at  any  time  have  lived  apart 
from  the  law,  was  "alive,"  that  is,  without  consciousness 
of  the  law,  prior  to  a  positive  commandment,  and  hence 
not  knowing  sin.  But  it  is  obvious  that  Paul  does  not 
mean  that  when  the  law  came  those  who  were  its  subjects 
at  once  "  died  "  {uTreOavov),  but  that  the  death  which  sin 


204  ^^^    TEACHER 

entails  became  operative  in  them,  and  would  take  its 
dreadful  course  working  their  ''destruction,"  unless 
through  faith  in  "the  last  Adam,"  who  abolished  death, 
they  should  fulfil  the  condition  of  attaining  "life." 

It  is  plainly  a  doctrine  of  the  apostle's  that  the  body  is 
the  seat  and  organ  of  sin,  and  carries  in  it  the  seeds  of 
death  during  its  life.  Sin  "reigns  in  the  mortal  body," 
and  commands  obedience  to  its  lusts  (Rom.  vi.  12).  The 
"members"  (Ate^r;)  are  "instruments  of  unrighteousness." 
"The  body  of  sin,"  that  is,  the  body  in  which  resides  the 
power  of  sin,  may  be  "done  away"  or  "destroyed"  (Rom. 
vi.  6).  "The  deeds  of  the  body"  may  be  "mortified"  by 
the  Spirit  (Rom.  viii.  13).  The  body  is  also  capable  of 
"  redemption,"  that  is,  transformation  into  or  being  "clothed 
upon  "  with  the  "  spiritual  body  "  or  "  body  of  glory  "  at 
the  Parousia  (Rom.  viii.  23).  It  is  "  vile,"  and  its  "  change  " 
is  earnestly  desired  as  a  deliverance  into  freedom  and  glory, 
in  which  condition  it  will  be  conformed  to  the  resurrection- 
body  of  Christ  (Phil.  iii.  21).  This  doctrine  receives  a 
graphic  expression  in  Rom.  vii.  9-24,  where  the  apostle 
represents  the  man  who  is  under  the  law  as  powerless  to 
do  the  good  that  he  would,  as  delighting  in  the  law  of  God 
after  the  inward  man,  but  seeing  a  different  law  in  his 
members  which  wars  against  the  law  of  his  mind,  and 
brings  him  into  captivity  to  the  law  of  sin  that  is  in  them. 
Hence  the  longing  for  that  transfigured  corporeity  which 
should  never  die,  the  incorruptible  "body  of  glory,"  and 
the  cry  to  be  delivered  from  "  this  body  of  death,"  whose 
impulses  lead  to  the  "destruction  "  of  the  whole  man. 

It  is  very  doubtful  whether  Paul  ever  employs  the  words 
"death,"  "dead,"  and  "die"  in  the  sense  of  moral  or 
spiritual  death,  as  they  have  come  to  be  used  in  our  cur- 
rent theological  terminology.  Rather  he  appears  always 
to  have  in  mind  physical  death  as  the  penalty  of  sin,  with 


DEATH,    LIFE,   AND   SALVATION  20 5 

the  supplementary  idea  of  "perishing"  or  the  deprivation 
of  the  resurrection-life.  Accordingly,  he  sets  over  against 
death  the  life  of  the  resurrection  instead  of  a  moral-spirit- 
ual renewal  in  i  Cor.  xv.  21:  ''For  since  by  man  came 
death,  by  man  came  also  the  resurrection  of  the  dead." 
The  counteracting  of  the  death  ''in  Adam"  by  Christ 
is  not  simply  a  spiritual  transformation  of  the  spiritually 
dead,  but  the  delivering  of  the  man  who  dies  in  Christ 
from  hades  and  the  clothing  of  him  with  a  "body  of  glory  " 
for  the  new  kingdom.  "  For  this  corruptible  must  put  on 
incorruption  "  (i  Cor.  xv.  53).  The  "God  who  quickeneth 
the  dead  "  is  He  whose  indwelling  Spirit  will  give  life  to 
the  "mortal  body"  (Rom.  viii.  11).  When  the  apostle 
declares  himself  to  be  "a  savour  of  death  unto  death"  to 
them  that  are  "perishing"  (2  Cor.  ii.  16),  he  means  that 
to  the  unbelievers  in  his  gospel,  who  are  in  a  condition 
which  if  persisted  in  will  end  in  the  hopeless  fate  of  those 
who  will  not  be  raised  at  the  Parousia,  his  message  will 
bring  precisely  this  result.  Accordingly,  Christ  is  the 
source  of  death  or  of  life  according  as  he  is  rejected  or 
accepted.  A  similar  conception  is  contained  in  the  words  : 
"The  sorrow  of  the  world  worketh  death"  (2  Cor.  vii.  10), 
that  is,  the  sorrow  which  those  whose  only  stake  is  the 
sensuous  well-being  of  the  world,  that  of  unbelievers, 
whose  minds  "the  god  of  this  world  has  blinded,"  works 
out  the  fate  which  awaits  them,  death,  "perishing"  the 
Messianic  airoiXeia. 

No  other  meaning  of  "  death  "  is  required  in  the  passage  : 
"  Know  ye  not  that  to  whom  ye  present  yourselves  as  ser- 
vants his  servants  ye  are  whom  ye  obey,  whether  of  sin 
unto  death  or  of  obedience  unto  righteousness  "  (Rom.  vi. 
16).!*  In  the  two  parallel  clauses  Paul  has  in  view  the  end 
"unto"  (el?)  which  the  two  sorts  of  obedience  lead,  as  in 
verses  21  and  22  he  declares  that  "the  end"  is  in  the  one 


206  THE    TEACHER 

case  "death"  and  in  the  other  ''eternal  life."  Two  oppo- 
site awards  will  be  adjudged  at  the  Parousia.  Those  who 
have  been  the  servants  of  sin  will  then  be  found  to  have 
died  never  to  live  again,  while  the  servants  of  obedience 
will  receive  the  reward  of  righteousness  or  resurrection 
to  ''eternal  life."  This  interpretation  will  at  once  be  seen 
to  be  the  only  correct  one  by  those  students  of  Paul  who 
have  apprehended  the  prominence  in  his  thought  of  the 
great  consummation  which  was  to  be  effected  when  Christ 
should  presently  come  in  power  and  glory  to  bring  the 
existing  world-order  to  an  end.  A  similar  anticipation 
of  the  result  of  sin  is  apparent  in  the  words  :  "  For  when 
we  were  in  the  flesh,  the  sinful  passions  which  were 
through  the  law  wrought  in  our  members  to  bring  forth 
fruit  unto  death  "  (Rom.  vii.  6).  That  moral  or  spiritual 
death  is  not  intended  here  is  evident  from  the  fact  that 
those  in  whom  this  destructive  power  is  working  are 
represented  as  already  "in  the  flesh,"  that  is,  in  a  state 
of  subjection  to  sin,  while  the  condition  which  will  result 
is  the  "fruit"  yet  to  be  borne  of  the  sinful  passions, 
which  is  nothing  else  than  death  or  "perishing"  in  the 
underworld.  The  same  idea  is  conveyed  in  the  words  : 
"The  commandment  which  was  unto  life,  this  was  found 
to  be  unto  death,"  and,  "Did  that  which  was  good  become 
death  unto  me  }  God  forbid  !  But  sin,  that  it  might  be 
shown  to  be  sin,  by  working  death  to  me  through  that 
which  was  good"  (verses  lo,  13).  There  are  two  opposing 
powers  which  are  of  world-historical  significance  to  the  race 
and  of  tragic  significance  to  each  individual,  —  "the  law 
of  sin  and  death  "  and  "the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life  in  Jesus 
Christ."  The  latter  sets  "  free  "  from  the  former  the  man 
who  fulfils  the  required  conditions.  The  Parousia  will 
reveal  the  result  of  the  conflict  between  the  two  in  the 
precise  terms  of  "life,"   "resurrection,"  and  "glory"  on 


DEATH,   LIFE,    AND  SALVATION  20/ 

the  one  hand,  and  of  ''death,"  ''perishing,"  and  "destruc- 
tion "  on  the  other,  according  as  men  hav^e  believed  or 
have  not  believed. 

Such  is  also  the  fateful  significance  of  the  words  :  "The 
mind  of  the  flesh  is  death  "  (Rom.  viii.  6).  The  works  of 
the  flesh  enumerated  in  Gal.  v.  19  result  precisely  in  ex- 
cluding those  who  "practise  such  things"  from  inheritance 
in  the  kingdom  of  God  —  an  exclusion  which  is  simply  and 
only  "death"  in  its  ultimate  form.  The  futurity  of  this 
consummation  is  plainly  expressed  in  the  words  :  "  If  ye 
live  after  the  flesh  ye  are  sure  to  die"  (Rom.  viii.  13). 
Here  the  form  of  expression  in  the  use  of  /xeWere  unmis- 
takably shows  what  we  have  seen  to  be  frequently  implied, 
how  the  apostle  looked  forward  to  the  completion  of  the 
course  of  sin,  when  at  "the  end"  the  work  of  death  would 
be  made  manifest  in  the  irrevocable  fortune  of  those  who 
should  then  be  found  to  be  without  "the  life-giving  Spirit." 
The  reference  to  the  future  contained  in  /jLeWere  excludes 
moral-spiritual  death;  and  mere  physical  dissolution,  to 
which  all  men  are  subject  on  account  of  sin,  is  of  course 
not  meant,  but  the  secondary  and  final  result  of  sin,  from 
which  all  may  escape  by  faith.  The  final  overthrow  of 
death  is  the  issue  of  the  conflict  between  it  and  the  powers 
of  life.  "  When  this  corruptible  shall  have  put  on  incorrup- 
tion,  then  shall  come  to  pass  the  saying  that  is  written, 
Death  is  swallowed  up  in  victory"  (i  Cor.  xv.  54).  The 
resurrection  of  the  believers  and  the  "change"  of  the 
living  Christians  (i  Cor.  xv.  51  f.)  denote  the  victory  over 
death.  In  the  kingdom  death  would  have  no  dominion. 
The  saints  clothed  with  incorruption  would  die  no  more. 
Paul  has  left  us  no  data  for  determining  whether  the 
destruction  of  death  at  the  Parousia  (i  Cor.  xv.  26)  was 
conceived  as  extending  to  the  realm  of  the  underworld. 
So  far  as  the  kingdom  is  concerned,  this  "last  enemy" 


208  THE    TEACHER 

is  certainly  conceived  to  be  destroyed,  for  it  is  a  kingdom 
of  "life."  If  the  annihilation  of  the  underworld  is  implied 
(Rev.  XX.  14),  ''  the  whole  creation "  would  be  delivered 
from  "the  bondage  of  corruption,"  and  become  a  suitable 
abode  for  the  children  of  God. 

The  foregoing  interpretation  of  "  death  "  furnishes  the 
key  to  the  meaning  which  Paul  attaches  to  its  opposite, 
"life"  (?&)^).  As  death  is  the  dissolution  of  the  body  and 
Messianic  or  eschatological  "  destruction "  iairoiKaa),  so 
life  is  not  primarily  moral  and  spiritual,  but  Messianic  and 
eschatological.  The  Pauline  "life"  includes  the  potential 
or  actual  incorruptible  corporeity  of  the  coming  kingdom 
of  God  which  the  Parousia  and  its  eternal  life  would  reveal. 
In  the  words  :  "  If  Christ  be  in  you,  the  body  is  dead  be- 
cause of  sin,  but  the  Spirit  is  life  because  of  righteousness" 
(Rom.  viii.  10),  the  body  is  represented  as  a  prey  to  death 
on  account  of  sin,  as  "the  wages  of  sin,"  while  the  spirit 
possessing  righteousness  by  reason  of  the  fact  that  Christ 
dwells  in  it  is  "  life,"  or  has  already  the  life-principle  which 
will  manifest  itself  at  the  Parousia  in  the  "  quickening  of 
the  mortal  body  "  according  to  the  following  verse.  Thus 
Paul  does  not  regard  the  moral-spiritual  life  which  the  be- 
lievers possessed  by  reason  of  their  fellowship  with  Christ 
or  of  the  indwelling  of  the  Spirit  as  an  end  in  itself,  but 
considers  it  with  reference  to  the  great  consummation  at 
the  Parousia,  that  is,  eschatologically.  This  is  apparent 
in  the  section  Rom.  vi.  4-8,  where  the  being  buried  with 
Christ  in  baptism,  in  which  "  the  old  man  was  crucified 
with  him,"  carries  with  it  the  obligation  to  "walk  in  new- 
ness of  life,"  because  this  fellowship  with  him  in  his  death 
implies  a  participation  in  his  resurrection.  Being  dead 
with  Christ  the  believers  will  at  "the  end"  "live  with 
him."  Their  "life"  in  the  present  has  not  only  its  real 
sisjnificance,  but  also  its  motive,  in  the  future  consumma- 


DEATH,  LIFE,  AND   SALVATION  209 

tion,  where  they  will  be  "glorified  together  with  him." 
Accordingly,  the  apostle  proceeds  to  say  that  Christ  in  his 
death  "  died  unto  sin  once,  but  in  that  he  liveth  he  liveth 
unto  God."  In  like  manner,  the  believers  should  reckon 
themselves  to  be  dead  to  sin,  but  alive  to  God  (verses  10, 
1 1).  Having  paid  the  penalty  of  sin  for  men  in  his  death 
he  now  lives  in  his  resurrected  state  the  eternal  life  that 
is  not  subject  to  death.  He  has  now  the  incorruptible 
"body  of  glory,"  and  the  completion  of  the  believers'  fel- 
lowship with  him  will  consist  in  their  possessing  new 
spiritual  bodies  "conformed"  to  his.  In  their  possession 
of  the  Spirit  they  have  the  "earnest"  or  pledge  of  "the 
redemption  of  their  bodies."  The  t<&>^  which  they  have 
by  virtue  of  their  mystic  union  with  Christ  is  potentially 
the  Messianic  eternal  life,  and  the  term  must  not  be 
emptied  of  this  signification. 

Likewise  in  the  passage  previously  quoted  (Rom.  viii.  2): 
"  The  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life  hath  made  me  free  from  the 
law  of  sin  and  death,"  "life"  is  the  opposite  of  all  that 
"death"  meant  to  the  apostle.  Over  against  the  dissolu- 
tion of  the  "mortal  body"  and  the  "  perishing "  in  the 
underworld  is  placed  the  resurrection  with  its  attendant 
blessedness  in  the  kingdom.  If  "the  mind  of  the  flesh," 
to  be  carnally  minded,  "  is  death,"  "  the  mind  of  the 
Spirit,"  the  being  spiritually  minded,  has  the  earnest  of  a 
share  in  the  "glory"  presently  to  be  revealed.  Those 
who  by  the  Spirit  mortify  the  deeds  of  the  body  shall 
"live,"  for  "the  Spirit  beareth  witness  "  with  the  spirit  of 
the  believers  that  they  are  "  children  of  God  ;  and  if  chil- 
dren then  heirs,"  whose  great  fortune  it  is  that  in  the  Pa- 
rousia  they  "will  be  glorified  with  him  "  (Rom.  viii.  6-17). 
It  is  this  triumphant  end  that  Paul  always  has  in  mind 
when  he  writes  of  the  Christian's  possession  of  the  "  life  " 
which  was  in   Christ  victorious  over  death.     Those  who 


2IO  THE    TEACHER 

'' seek  for  glory  and  honour  and  incorruption  "  or  immor- 
tality, will  receive  as  their  award  just  this,  that  is,  '' eternal 
life  "  (Rom.  ii.  7).  Theirs  will  be  an  "  eternal  weight  of 
glory"  and  the  putting  on  of  "incorruption"  (2  Cor.  iv. 
17;  I  Cor.  XV.  53).  The  "fruit"  of  the  believers'  "being 
made  free  from  sin"  is  "sanctification,  and  the  end  eter- 
nal life  "  (Rom.  vi.  22),  Over  against  the  reign  of  death 
"  through  the  trespass  of  one  "  is  set  the  future  "reign  in 
life"  of  those  who  "receive"  the  offered  grace  and  "the 
gift  of  righteousness"  (Rom.  v.  17).  The  writer  of 
I  Timothy  expresses  the  apostle's  idea  in  the  declaration 
that  if  the  believers  "endure"  they  "will  also  reign  with 
Christ  "  (i  Tim.  ii.  12).  In  like  manner  the  "Justification 
of  life  "  which  the  believers  receive  through  Christ  (Rom. 
V.  18)  is  the  justification  that  leads  to  life,  that  is  to  the 
"eternal  life"  in  the  kingdom  (verse  21). 

The  foregoing  interpretation  is  supported  by  the  doc- 
trine of  the  resurrection  which  predominates  in  i  Cor.  xv. 
Here  the  dying  in  Adam  and  the  being  made  alive  in 
Christ  are  contrasted  as  physical  death  with  its  secondary 
conception  of  perishing  in  the  case  of  unbelievers  and  the 
resurrection  to  existence  in  the  spiritual  body  of  those  who 
accept  him.  The  first  man  was  only  a  living  soul  ("^vxv) 
doomed  to  death,  as  are  all  those  who  inherit  only  from 
him,  while  the  last  Adam  was  made  "a  life-giving  Spirit" 
{irvevfia),  and  those  who  through  faith  become  "  members  " 
of  him  will  be  raised  at  his  coming  and  "bear  the  image  of 
the  heavenly."  No  careful  student  of  Paul  can  have  failed 
to  observe  the  prominence  of  the  eschatological  factor 
of  his  Christology.  To  this  his  interest  in  the  ethical 
aspects  of  the  life  of  Jesus  is  subordinate.  Just  so  the  be- 
liever's relation  to  him  at  the  end  or  in  "  the  day  of  the 
Lord"  has  everywhere  the  chief  place  in  the  apostle's 
thought.     As  the  life  of  their  Lord  was  consummated  in 


DEATH,   LIFE,  AND   SALVATION  211 

the  resurrection,  so  will  theirs  be.  Burdened  and  groaning 
in  this  tabernacle  of  flesh,  they  long  to  be  clothed  upon 
with  "the  building  from  God,"  the  "  celestial  body,"  and 
this  swallowing  up  of  what  is  mortal  will  be  the  crowning 
and  completion  of  "  life."  They  have  sown  to  the  Spirit, 
and  their  glorious  harvest  will  be  eternal  life  (Gal.  vi.  8). 

The  passages  discussed  in  the  foregoing  pages  show  the 
great  significance  which  death  and  life  have  in  the  apostle's 
thought.  In  them  he  sees  the  consummation  of  human 
existence  under  the  divine  order  of  award  in  connection 
with  the  plan  of  redemption.  The  ultimate  result  of  sin  is 
death,  the  end  of  righteousness  is  life.  The  terrible  evil 
that  came  into  the  world  through  Adam  carried  with  it,  so 
long  as  sin  was  left  to  do  its  awful  work  unchecked,  not 
only  the  dissolution  of  the  body,  but  also  the  "  destruction  " 
of  those  who  had  no  hope  of  the  resurrection  at  "  the  last 
day."  On  the  other  hand,  the  principle  which  came  into 
the  world  through  "the  last  Adam  "  was  destined  to  coun- 
teract in  those  who  should  come  into  fellowship  with  him 
the  power  of  death,  is  the  greatest  good,  and  the  consum- 
mation of  their  fortune.  This  is  "  life,"  the  resurrection, 
the  putting  on  of  incorruption,  the  entrance  into  the 
"glory"  of  the  Messianic  kingdom.  While  death  and  life 
are  conceived  as  states  beginning  in  the  present  world, 
they  receive  their  chief  prominence  either  in  an  actual 
or  an  implied  reference  to  "the  end."  Here  will  be  the 
supreme  reward,  and  all  the  appointments  of  religion  exist 
for  its  realisation.  All  that  is  to  be  hoped  for  at  the  end, 
all  that  can  be  conceived  of  blessedness,  yea  all  that  it  hath 
not  entered  into  the  heart  of  man  to  conceive  of  things 
reserved  for  the  believers,  and  all  that  is  to  be  reaped  in 
the  great  harvest  of  joy  in  the  time  to  come,  the  Messianic 
age,  is  included  in  the  "life  "  on  which  the  apostle  dwells 
with  exhaustless  interest.     For  the  sake  of  securing  this 


212  THE    TEACHER 

blessedness  Christ  died  and  rose  triumphant,  for  this  are 
all  the  steadfastness,  the  hoping,  the  enduring,  the  waiting 
for  the  coming  of  the  Lord,  and  for  this  is  the  Spirit  be- 
stowed which  is  the  earnest  of  the  redemption  of  the  body. 
To  this  faith  looks  forward  beholding  the  things  that  are 
unseen  and  eternal ;  for  by  faith  the  believer  is  united  in 
mystic  fellowship  with  Christ,  through  which  he  has  the 
assurance  that  he  will  ''live"  and  ''reign"  with  him. 
Hence  "life"  and  not  "righteousness"  is  the  preeminent 
possession.  The  latter  is  subordinate  to  the  former,  and  a 
means  for  its  attainment.  The  "gift  of  righteousness" 
serves  to  secure  to  those  who  receive  it  the  Messianic 
blessedness,  and  they  will  "reign  in  life."  Righteousness 
is  the  means  through  which  "  grace  reigns  unto  eternal 
life." 

The  meaning  of  "salvation"  (acorrjpLa)  in  the  apostle's 
terminology  is  implied  in  several  of  the  passages  quoted 
in  the  foregoing  discussion.  Like  the  terms  "life"  and 
"death"  it  denotes,  indeed,  a  condition  in  the  earthly 
state  of  existence,  but  its  predominant  sense  is  not  that  of 
a  moral  and  spiritual  order  of  life,  but  rather  that  of  a  final 
deliverance  from  that  dreaded  evil,  that  greatest  of  calami- 
ties, the  Messianic  "perishing"  or  "destruction."  In  a 
word,  its  significance  is  eschatological.  It  either  expresses 
or  implies  in  the  connection  in  which  it  is  employed  a  parti- 
cipation in  the  glorious  Messianic  kingdom.  Those  who  are 
to  be  saved  are  the  living  believers  and  the  Christians  who 
in  the  touching  Pauline  phrase  had  "fallen  asleep."  The 
former  will  be  "changed"  into  an  incorruptible  corporeity, 
and  the  latter  raised  from  the  dead  with  spiritual  bodies. 
The  former  will  not  "anticipate"  the  latter  (i  Thess.  iv. 
13-18  ;  I  Cor.  XV.  52-58).  This  doctrine  is  grounded  upon 
the  principle  that  "  flesh  and  blood  cannot  inherit  the  king- 
dom of  God  "  (i  Cor.  XV.  50).     The  kingdom  was  to  be  one 


DEATH,  LIFE,  AND   SALVATION  2l3 

of  "incorruption."  The  living  believers  would,  accord- 
ingly, escape  the  "  tribulation  and  anguish  "  which  were 
appointed  for  the  wicked  who  should  survive  until  the  Mes- 
sianic judgment.  As  to  how  the  transformation  of  the 
bodies  of  the  living  saints  was  to  be  effected  the  apostle 
gives  no  intimation.  Perhaps  he  regarded  the  teaching 
that  the  bodies  of  those  who  were  ''Christ's  at  his  coming" 
would  be  "quickened"  through  the  Spirit  dwelling  in  them 
as  including  all  that  needed  be  said  upon  the  subject.  That 
salvation  was  to  be  the  portion  of  the  living  and  the  dead 
believers  on  the  great  "day  of  the  Lord  "  is  evident  from 
the  declaration  :  "  For  God  appointed  us  not  unto  wrath, 
but  unto  the  obtaining  of  salvation  through  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  who  died  for  us,  that,  whether  we  wake  or  sleep  [at 
the  time  of  his  coming],  we  should  live  together  with  him  " 
(i  Thess.  v.  9,  lo).  This  passage  accords  with  the  declara- 
tion that  at  the  coming  of  Christ,  with  which  salvation  was 
associated  in  the  mind  of  the  apostle,  "  We  that  are  alive, 
that  are  left,  shall  with  them  [the  raised]  be  caught  up  in 
the  clouds  to  meet  the  Lord  in  the  air  ;  and  so  shall  we 
ever  be  with  the  Lord  (i  Thess.  iv.  17).  Then  when  the 
wicked  shall  in  vain  be  saying,  "  Peace  and  safety,"  and 
"  sudden  destruction "  shall  come  upon  them,  and  they 
shall  in  no  wise  escape  (i  Thess.  v.  3),  the  believers  will 
receive  salvation  or  deliverance  from  the  dread  Messianic 
aTTcoXeta,  the  overthrow,  the  perishing;  for,  "being  now 
justified  by  his  blood,  shall  we  be  saved  from  the  wrath  of 
God  through  him  "  (Rom.  v.  9).  The  end  to  which  the 
apostle  looks  forward  amidst  his  tribulations  lies  beyond 
the-  confines  of  "this  present  evil  world,"  to  "deliver" 
believers  out  of  Vv^hich  Christ  died  (Gal.  i.  4),  and  his  gaze 
is  steadfastly  fixed  upon  the  heavenly  kingdom  that  is  to 
come  in  the  joyful  day  when  the  Lord  shall  appear.  Salva- 
tion is  deliverance  from  the  bondage  to  the  clogging  flesh, 


214  THE    TEACHER 

**the  body  of  death,"  into  ''the  glorious  Hberty  of  the 
children  of  God."  Accordingly  he  declares  :  "  Our  citizen- 
ship is  in  heaven  ;  whence  also  we  wait  for  a  Saviour,  the 
Lord  Jesus  Christ,  who  shall  fashion  anew  the  body  of  our 
humiliation  that  it  may  be  conformed  to  the  body  of  his 
glory,  according  to  the  working  whereby  he  is  able  to  sub- 
ject all  things  unto  himself  "  (Phil.  iii.  20,  21).  It  was  "  in 
the  day"  of  this  Saviour  expected  from  heaven  that  the  sal- 
vation of  the  believers  was  to  be  consummated.  A  Chris- 
tian guilty  of  incest  might  be  delivered  over  to  Satan  *'  for 
the  destruction  of  his  flesh,"  but  the  apostle  hopes  for  the 
salvation  of  the  offender's  "  spirit  "  "  in  the  day  of  the  Lord 
Jesus"  (i  Cor.  v.  5).  An  anticipation  of  "the  end"  is 
implied  in  the  words  :  "  For  the  word  of  the  cross  is  to 
them  that  are  perishing  foolishness  ;  but  unto  us  who  are 
being  saved  it  is  the  power  of  God"  (i  Cor.  i.  18).  Here 
the  condition  of  being  exposed  to  the  Messianic  "  perish- 
ing "  at  the  last  day  on  the  one  hand,  and  that  of  hope  for 
the  Messianic  deliverance  and  entrance  into  the  kingdom 
of  God  on  the  other,  are  contained  by  implication  in 
the  participial  form  of  expression  either,  says  Meyer,  as  a 
certainty  or  as  a  process  of  development.  So  the  declara- 
tion that  "the  body  is  dead  because  of  sin  "  means  that  the 
body  is  certain  to  die  under  the  universal  law  of  death,  and 
the  phrase  "by  which  ye  are  saved"  (i  Cor.  v.  2)  must  be 
understood  as  implying  a  condition  which  will  in  the  end 
result  in  salvation.  "  The  day  [of  the  Lord]  will  declare" 
the  work  of  each  teacher,  "because  it  is  revealed  in  fire." 
When  the  fire  shall  have  "  proved  "  the  work,  and  it  shall 
be  burned  up,  the  man  will  suffer  loss,  but  he  himself  will 
be  saved,  "yet  so  as  through  fire."  So  the  character  and 
the  work  of  men  are  regarded  as  conditions  in  which  is 
involved  either  the  "destruction"  or  the  "salvation"  of 
their  souls  and  bodies  when,  at  the  great  judgment  of  the 


DEATH,  LIFE,  AND   SALVATION  21  5 

Parousia,  God  ''shall  judge  the  secrets"  of  their  hearts. 
The  emphasis  is,  however,  not  placed  by  the  apostle  on  the 
present  moral-spiritual  state  as  something  complete  and 
sufficient  in  itself,  but  is  thrown  forward  to  the  consumma- 
tion which  is  to  be  effected  in  the  future  when  the  salva- 
tion or  destruction  will  be  accomplished  in  fact  by  the  final 
award  of  ''life"  or  "death."  Accordingly,  he  admonishes 
the  Corinthians  that  they  "judge  nothing  before  the  time, 
until  the  Lord  come,  who  will  both  bring  to  light  the  hid- 
den things  of  darkness,  and  make  manifest  the  counsels  of 
the  hearts  ;  and  then  shall  each  man  have  his  praise  from 
God"  (i  Cor.  iv.  5). 

The  blessedness  of  Christian  "  salvation  "  that  is  to  be 
the  portion  of  believers  is  a  glorious  fortune  to  which  they 
are  exhorted  to  look  forward,  "  waiting  for  the  revelation 
of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  who  shall  also  confirm  you  unto 
the  end,  that  ye  be  unreprovable  in  the  day  of  our  Lord 
Jesus  Christ  "  (i  Cor.  i.  7,  8).  It  will  consist,  in  part,  in 
the  "fellowship"  (kolvcovlo)  of  God's  Son,  Jesus  Christ 
(verse  9),  which  is  a  participation  in  the  glory  of  the  divine 
sonship,  in  the  "  eternal  life  "  of  the  Messianic  kingdom. 
If  this  adoption  as  sons  (vloOeaia)  has  its  beginning  in  this 
life,  its  consummation  is  looked  forward  to  as  a  bodily  and 
spiritual  event  of  the  great  "  day  of  the  Lord."  "  And  not 
only  so,  but  ourselves  also  who  have  the  firstfruits  of  the 
Spirit,  even  we  ourselves  groan  within  ourselves,  waiting 
for  our  adoption,  to  zvit,  the  redemption  of  our  body " 
(Rom.  viii.  23).  Not  only  is  the  putting  on  of  "incorrup- 
tion  "  included  in  this  "fellowship"  with  Christ,  not  only 
will  believers  appear  when  their  salvation  is  consummated 
in  the  "  glory "  of  his  transfigured  body,  but  those  for 
whom  this  great  fortune  is  reserved  are  promised  a  higher 
blessedness  appropriate  to  their  divine  sonship.  Hence 
the  admonition  :  "Walk  worthily  of  God,  who  calleth  you 


2l6  THE    TEACHER 

into  His  own  kingdom  and  glory"  (i  Thess.  ii.  12).  "The 
image  of  the  earthy  "  will  not  alone  be  put  off,  and  that  of 
the  ''heavenly"  put  on,  but  as  sons  they  will  become 
''heirs  of  God,  joint-heirs  with  Christ,"  in  the  dominion 
and  eternal  joy  of  the  kingdom  soon  to  come  (Rom.  viii. 
17;  I  Cor.  XV.  49).  Since  the  believers  having  suffered 
with  Christ  will  be  "glorified  with  him,"  the  apostle 
exclaims,  looking  forward  to  the  realisation  of  the  joint- 
heirship :  "Let  us  rejoice  in  hope  of  the  glory  of  God" 
(Rom.  V.  2).  This  "hope"  receives  the  expression  appro- 
priate to  an  assured  fact  in  the  words  :  "  For  whom  He 
foreknew  He  also  foreordained  to  be  conformed  to  the 
image  of  His  Son,  that  he  might  be  the  firstborn  among 
many  brethren ;  and  whom  He  foreordained  them  He  also 
called  ;  and  whom  He  called  them  He  also  justified  ;  and 
whom  He  justified  them  He  also  glorified  "  (Rom.  viii.  29). 
The  being  "conformed  to  the  image  of  His  Son  "  is  doubt- 
less the  "adoption,"  "the  redemption  of  our  body"  spoken 
of  in  verse  23,  the  future  "glory  which  shall  be  revealed" 
(verse  18)  when  the  believers  shall  enter  into  the  kingdom 
clothed  with  "incorruption."  The  glorification  which  is 
actually  in  the  future,  is  spoken  of  as  already  accomplished 
(iBo^aae),  so  certain  is  the  apostle  of  its  consummation. 

The  "glory"  and  "incorruption,"  which  are  among  the 
chief  goods  of  salvation  as  conceived  by  the  apostle,  are 
set  in  strong  contrast  with  the  earthly  conditions  of  exist- 
ence. With  the  latter  he  associates  qualities  and  states 
which  he  regards  with  extreme  repugnance,  while  he  looks 
forward  to  the  former  with  eager  longing  and  inextin- 
guishable hope.  Here  the  believer  is  bound  to  "the  body 
of  death"  which  he  "buffets  and  brings  into  bondage" 
(i  Cor.  ix.  27).  It  is  a  "body  of  humiliation"  (Phil.  iii. 
21)  which  at  death  is  sown  in  "corruption,"  "dishonor," 
and  "weakness"  (i  Cor.  xv.  43).     On  the  great  day  of  sal- 


DEATH,   LIFE,  AND   SALVATION  217 

vation  this  will  be  transformed  into  a  ''body  of  glory."  It 
will  be  raised  in  ''incorruption,"  ''glory,"  "power,"  and 
as  "a  spiritual  body."  The  living  believers  will  be 
"changed"  (i  Cor.  xv.  51),  and  the  groaning  creation  will 
be  delivered  from  the  bondage  of  corruption  into  "the  lib- 
erty of  the  glory  of  the  children  of  God"  (Rom.  viii.  21), 
so  that  the  kingdom  of  God  and  the  theatre  of  its  manifes- 
tation will  contain  nothing  that  has  the  taint  of  death. 
The  supreme  blessedness  of  this  condition  of  salvation 
will  consist  in  a  clearer  vision  of  God  than  is  possible  to 
the  believer  while  he  is  in  the  tabernacle  of  flesh.  "  For 
now  we  see  in  a  mirror,  darkly ;  but  then  face  to  face. 
Now  I  know  in  part ;  but  then  shall  I  know  even  as  also 
I  have  been  known  "  (i  Cor.  xiii.  12).     "As  it  is  written. 

Things  which  eye  saw  not,  and  ear  heard  not, 
And  which  entered  not  into  the  heart  of  man. 
Whatsoever  things  God  prepared  for  them  that  love  him." 


CHAPTER   X 

THE   DOCTRINE   OF   SIN* 

IN  the  writings  of  Paul  no  explicit  doctrine  of  sin,  its 
origin,  nature,  and  operations,  is  distinctively  set 
forth  as  a  part  of  a  complete  theological  system.  In  fact 
there  is  no  Pauline  system  of  doctrine  to  which  a  teaching 
concerning  sin  could  have  an  articulate  relation  in  the 
sense  of  dogmatic  construction.  The  currents  of  the  apos- 
tle's thought  centre  in  soteriology,  and  the  classical  pas- 
sage regarding  the  entrance  of  sin  into  the  world  (Rom.  v. 
12-19)  is  one  of  the  members  of  an  antithesis,  the  two 
terms  of  which  are  Adam,  the  head  of  the  old  order  of  sin 
and  death,  and  Christ,  the  founder  of  the  new  order  of 
righteousness  and  life  (see  also  i  Cor.  xv.  45-50).  It 
would,  however,  be  a  mistake  to  conclude  from  this  cir- 
cumstance that  his  teaching  regarding  sin  is  of  slight 
importance  to  his  doctrine  as  a  whole.  On  the  contrary, 
it  is  of  such  fundamental  significance  that  a  right  under- 
standing of  it  is  essential  to  an  adequate  comprehension 
and  a  due  relating  of  other  aspects  of  his  thought.  The 
profound  interest  of  the  apostle  himself  in  the  subject  is 
evident  from  the  prominence  given  to  it  in  the  opening 
chapters  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  and  from  numerous 
passages  in  the  four  great  Epistles,  f 

*  The  American  Journal  of  Theology^  April,  1898. 

fSee  in  particular  Rom.  iv.  7,  8,  v.  12-21,  vi.  i,  2,  6,  7,  10,  11,  12-14, 
22,  23,  vii.  5,  7-9;  I  Cor.  XV.  3,  17,  56;  2  Cor.  v.  21;  Gal.  i.  4,  ii.  17, 
iii.  22. 

218 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  219 

Sin  is  conceived  by  Paul  under  a  twofold  aspect,  (i)  as 
a  principle  and  a  power  in  the  individual  and  in  human 
life  and  history  (a^apTia)  and,  (2)  as  an  act  in  violation  of 
the  divine  law  (7rapd/3a(TL<;,  ajxaprdveiv).  The  former  may 
be  regarded  as  its  objective  and  the  latter  as  its  subjective 
aspect.  The  term  a^iapria  has  not,  however,  throughout 
an  objective  reference,  but  sometimes  expresses  in  the 
plural  number  concrete  acts  of  disobedience,  as  when  sins 
are  said  to  be  ''covered"  (Rom.  iv.  7),  or  "taken  away" 
(Rom.  xi.  27),  and  when  Christ  is  said  to  have  "died  for 
our  sins"  (i  Cor.  xv.  3  ;  see  also  i  Cor.  xv.  17  and  Gal.  i. 
4).  Sin  as  a  category,  a  general  term,  a  principle,  is 
spoken  of  as  a  subject  to  which  certain  predicates  may 
be  attached  quite  as  if  it  were  conceived  as  a  personal 
agent.  It  has  come  into  the  world,  where  it  has  domin- 
ion, works  concupiscence,  slays,  comes  to  life,  deceives, 
does  the  wrong  which  the  better  self  rejects,  holds  men 
in  bondage,  and  is  a  force  which  has  a  "law"  (Rom.  v. 
12,  21,  vi.  14.  17,  vii.  9,  II,  20,  23,  25).  The  universal 
sway  of  this  power  in  human  life  and  history  is  a  capi- 
tal proposition  of  the  apostle's  which  he  undertakes  to 
establish  by  an  induction  from  observed  facts  of  sinful- 
ness, by  individual  experience,  and  by  Scripture  (Rom. 
chaps,  i.  ii.  ;  iii.  10-12,  19,  23,  vii.  23).  He  makes  no  ex- 
ception in  favour  of  the  Jews  who,  equally  with  the  gentiles, 
are  "included  under  sin."  In  this  respect  he  is  not  in 
accord  with  the  Jewish  theology,  striking  agreements  with 
which  are  not  wanting  elsewhere  in  his  thought,  as  will 
appear  in  the  course  of  our  inquiry.  For  the  Jewish  the- 
ology maintained  not  only  the  possibility  of  sinlessness  in 
man,  but  also  that  some  men  were  actually  without  sin,  for 
example,  the  Patriarchs,  Elijah,  and  Hezekiah.* 

*See  Weber,  System  der  altsynagogalen  Palastinischen  Theologie,  pp.  52  f., 
223  f. 


220  THE    TEACHER 

How  Paul  thought  sin  {afxapTia)  as  a  power  and  princi- 
ple to  be  connected  with  human  nature  is  a  problem  which 
must  be  considered  before  we  can  further  pursue  the  in- 
vestigation of  the  subject  in  hand.  The  discussion  of  this 
question  requires  a  glance  at  one  or  two  points  in  his  doc- 
trine of  man  or  his  anthropology.  In  the  apostle's  physical 
anthropology  the  outward  man  (6  e^co  avOpcoiros:)  is  regarded 
as  a  material  organism,  the  substance  of  which  is  flesh 
(crdp^).  This  is  the  perishable  part  of  man's  nature,  which 
** cannot  inherit  the  kingdom  of  God,"  the  "corruptible," 
which  in  the  resurrection  ''  must  put  on  incorruption " 
(i  Cor.  XV.  50,  53,  54).  A  man  may  speak  of  it  as  belong- 
ing to  himself  and  as  that  of  which  he  is  in  part  composed 
(Rom.  vii.  18,  "  my  flesh,"  vii.  14,  '' I  am  fleshly,"  adpKLvo^, 
of  flesh).  Bodily  or  physical  descent  is  "  according  to  the 
flesh  "(Rom.  ix.  5,  8  ;  Gal.  iv.  23;  i  Cor.  x.  18),  and  to 
live  the  bodily  life  is  to  "be  in  the  flesh,"  while  the  mate- 
rial support  of  the  physical  being  is  designated  as  "  carnal 
things  "  (2  Cor.  x.  3  ;  Rom.  xv.  27).  The  matter  constitut- 
ing the  body  cannot,  however,  be  regarded  as  lifeless,  and 
accordingly  Paul  employs  the  term  'v/^f%>7  for  the  life- 
principle,  and  it  has  been  truly  remarked  that  acip^  and 
'^^XV  ^I's  so  closely  related  in  his  anthropology  that  the 
one  conception  is  not  to  be  thought  of  without  the  other. 
Inseparable  in  life,  they  are  together  devoted  to  corrup- 
tion. The  closely  related  sense  of  the  two  terms  is  shown 
by  the  use  in  the  same  signification  of  the  adjectives 
adpKLvo^  and  yjrv')(^Lfc6<;,  and  by  the  extended  application  of 
both  words  with  7rd<;  to  denote  all  men  *  in  accordance 
with  Old  Testament  usage  (see  also  crcofia  '\^v')(^iic6v,  "  natu- 
ral body,"  i.e.,  body  of  flesh,  as  contrasted  with  the  spir- 
itual body,"  I  Cor.  xv.  44).  The  flexibility  of  words  in 
the  Pauline  terminology  (a  fact  too   often  overlooked  in 

*7ra(ra  (rdp^,  irdaa  '^vx'fl- 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  221 

the  study  of  the  apostle's  thought)  is  apparent  in  the 
frequent  employment  of  ''flesh"  in  the  sense  of  "body" 
or  "members"  and  vice  versa.  Accordingly,  we  find 
"body  of  sin"  and  "flesh  of  sin"  (Rom.  vi.  6,  viii.  3), 
and  "flesh  "  and  "body"  in  substantially  the  same  sense.* 
Yet  the  employment  of  "body"  where  "flesh"  would  be 
entirely  inappropriate  and  even  self-contradictory  shows 
that  the  two  terms  are  not  in  the  Pauline  usage  through- 
out synonymous. 

The  discrimination  maintained  by  Ludemann,f  Pfleid- 
erer,  J  Holtzmann,  §  Schmiedel,  ||  and  others  that  adpl^ 
denotes  the  "substance"  and  o-w/xa  the  "form"  of  the 
outer  man  is  tenable  so  long  as  it  is  not  applied  with  too 
much  "vigour  and  rigour."  For  Paul  undoubtedly  con- 
ceived the  resurrection-body,  the  crw/xa  irvevixaTiicov,  as  hav- 
ing a  form  identical  with  that  of  the  aodjjia  ^jrv^^^ifcoi',  but  a 
different  substance,  since  it  was  to  be  a  "  body  of  glory," 
"fashioned  like  unto"  that  of  the  risen  and  ascended  Christ 
(i  Cor.  XV.  44,  49 ;  Phil.  iii.  21).  While  the  body  is  said  to 
be  "mortal"  (Rom.  vi.  12),  as  it  must  be  when  conceived 
simply  as  consisting  of  corruptible  flesh,  it  is  declared  to 
be  capable  of  "redemption"  (Rom.  viii.  23),  i.e.,  of  being 
saved  from  "  perishing "  in  death,  and  of  being  "  quick- 
ened "  (Rom.  viii.  11),  on  condition  that  the  Spirit  of  Him 
who  raised  up  Christ  from  the  dead  dwelt  in  its  possessor. 
It  is  noteworthy  that  such  affirmations  are  nowhere  made 
of  the  flesh.  The  discrimination  in  question  is  supported 
by  the  frequent  antitheses  of  "flesh  "  and  all  that  pertains 
to  and  partakes  of  it  and  the  divine  Spirit  and  its  opera- 
tions and  ministry.  "  He  that  soweth  to  his  flesh  [not 
body]    shall    of   the    flesh    reap   corruption  ;    but  he   that 

*Rom.  viii.  13;    2  Cor.  iv.  4,  10,  1 1,  v.  6,  x.  2,  3;    Phil.  i.  22,  24. 
'^  Die  patdmische  Anthropologie.  %  Neutest.  Theol. 

X  Pa-alinismtis.  ||  Hand-Commentar. 


222  THE    TEACHER 

soweth  to  the  Spirit  shall  of  the  Spirit  reap  life  everlast- 
ing "  (Gal.  vi.  8).*  The  contention  that  adp^  denotes  the 
whole  man  empirically  constituted  and  conscious  of  his 
opposition  to  the  law  fails  in  view  of  the  antithesis  of  the 
outward  and  the  inward  man,  and  is  irreconcilable  with 
the  distinction  made  with  unmistakable  clearness  between 
the  self  (e7ft>)  and  the  sin  dwelling  in  the  flesh,  and 
between  the  ''law  in  the  members  "  and  ''the  law  of  the 
mind"  (z^oO?)  in  Rom.  vii.  17-23. 

In  the  ethical  signification  of  aap^  in  the  anthropology 
of  Paul  we  find  the  relation  of  sin  to  human  nature,  and  it 
is  precisely  in  the  conflict  already  mentioned  between  the 
outward  and  the  inward  man  that  the  kernel  of  the  problem 
lies.  Leaving  on  one  side  for  the  present  the  consideration 
of  the  question  how  sin  came  to  exist  in  man  (a  question 
which  Paul  does  not  definitely  answer),  it  will  be  sufficient 
to  indicate  the  part  of  his  nature  to  which  it  is  assigned. 
There  is  certainly  no  want  of  precision  in  the  apostle's 
declarations  on  this  point.  In  speaking  of  the  law  as 
calling  sin  into  activity  he  says  that  in  man  (for  he  must 
here  be  regarded  as  personating  mankind  in  general), 
"that  is,  in  his  flesh,  dwelleth  no  good  thing,"  and  when,  a 
little  further  on,  he  asserts  that  it  is  not  the  man,  that  is, 
the  essential  e7c6,  who  does  the  wrong,  but  sin  that  dwell- 
eth in  him,  it  is  evident  that  sin  as  a  power  and  principle 
is  equivalent  in  his  thought  to  the  "no  good  thing,"  or 
evil  of  the  preceding  verse,  and  that,  accordingly,  it  has  its 
seat  in  the  flesh.  The  physical  sense  of  (jdp^  in  this  con- 
nection is  apparent  from  what  immediately  follows,  when 

*  The  terms  of  these  antitheses  are  such  as  "  flesh  "  {<rdp^,  for  which  we 
cannot  think  of  Paul  as  here  using  "body")  and  "Spirit"  (Trj/eO/tta),  "  cor- 
ruption "  ((pdopd),  which  pertains  to  the  flesh,  and  "  incorruption  "  (^d(p6apaia), 
"the  natural"  (to  \j/vxi-K^f)  and  "the  spiritual"  (to  Trvev/xar ik6v),  "  Reshly^' 
(aapKiKd),  and  "mighty"  (SvvaTa),  etc.  (Rom.  i.  3,  4,  ii.  28,  29,  I  Cor.  ii. 
14,  15;    2  Cor.  i.  12,  X.  4;   Gal.  iv.  29). 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  223 

he  proceeds  to  contrast  the  outward  and  the  inward  man, 
and  represents  the  subject  as  delighting  in  the  law  of  God 
after  the  inward  man,  but  finding  in  his  **  members  "  another 
law  warring  against  the  law  of  his  mind  and  bringing  him 
into  captivity  to  the  law  of  sin  which  is  in  his  members. 
The  conclusion  of  this  much  misunderstood  passage  is  : 
**  So  then  with  the  mind  (vov^)  I  myself  serve  the  law  of 
God,  but  with  the  flesh  i^adp^)  the  law  of  sin,"  where  adp^ 
must  evidently  be  interpreted  by  ''  members  "  in  the  pre- 
ceding verse  (Rom.  vii.  17-25).  This  interpretation  is 
supported  by  the  fact  that  Paul  often  connects  sin  with 
the  body  regarded  as  the  form  which  the  flesh  assumes  in 
the  earthly  life  of  man.  ''The  body  of  sin"  (Rom.  vi.  6) 
signifies  the  physical  organism  or  the  "members,"  so  far 
as  it  is  controlled  by  sin,  and  is  parallel  with  "  the  flesh 
of  sin  "  or  "■  sinful  flesh  "  (Rom.  viii.  3).  *'  This  body  of 
death"  (not  ''the  body  of  this  death")  in  Rom.  vii.  24, 
and  the  o-w/xa  ve/cpov  of  Rom.  viii.  10  correspond  with 
"mortal  flesh"  in  2  Cor.  iv.  11.  Compare  also  "live  after 
the  flesh"  and  "mortify  the  deeds  of  the  body"  in  Rom. 
viii.  13  and  "crucify  the  flesh"  in  Gal.  v.  24. 

The  misinterpretation  of  adp^  as  something  different 
from  the  material  substance  of  man's  earthly  body  is  due 
in  part  to  the  erroneous  idea  that  the  apostle's  thought  on 
the  subject  moved  entirely  within  the  circle  of  the  Old 
Testament  anthropology.  His  conception  includes,  indeed, 
the  essential  notion  of  flesh  ^t?^  expressed  in  the  canon- 
ical Hebrew  writings,  which,  according  to  Wendt,*  is 
that  of  "living  beings  with  the  accessory  notion  of  the 
absolute  weakness  and  transitoriness  of  their  nature  over 
against  the  power  and  living  operation  of  God."  But  he 
passes  altogether  beyond  the  Old  Testament  idea  in  asso- 
ciating with  the  adp^  an  element  of  sinfulness  which  Wendt 

*Die  Begriffe  Fleisch  und  Geist,  etc. 


224 


THE    TEACHER 


is  unable  to  find  in  any  of  the  writers  of  that  Hterature.* 
Paul  ''would  have  remained,"  says  Holtzmann,  **  within 
the  Jewish  representation  if,  according  to  his  apprehen- 
sion, just  as  the  inward  man,  reason,  heart,  conscience, 
would  gravitate  to  the  good,  so  the  outward  man,  or  rather 
the  flesh  of  which  it  consists,  would  also  gravitate  to  the 
bad."  f  But  for  the  apostle  the  flesh,  while  not  itself  sin, 
contains  impulses,  desires,  and  lusts  which  are  in  direct 
opposition  to  the  good,  which  "war  against  the  law  of  the 
mind,"  and  bring  man  into  captivity  to  the  law  of  sin  that 
is  in  his  members  (Rom.  vii.  23). 

Whether  in  this  position  Paul  was  on  the  ground  of  the 
later  Jewish  theology  or  that  of  Hellenistic  ethical  dualism 
or  that  of  the  first  Christian  anthropology,  which  was  his 
own,  is  a  question  which  has  received  contradictory  an- 
swers. There  is  probably  truth  in  all  three  positions. 
While  the  radical  metaphysical  dualism  of  Greek  thought 
finds  no  expression  in  his  writings,  the  Hellenistic  influence 
is  probably  apparent  in  his  ethical  dualism  of  the  vov^  and 
the  (jap^,  which,  with  the  substitution  generally  of  o-Miia^ 
ra  TrdOr],  and  related  terms  for  adp^,  is  frequently  found  in 
Philo.  In  his  idea  of  the  flesh  in  relation  to  the  mind, 
which  would  serve  the  law  of  God,  he  appears  to  be  in 
accord  with  the  Hellenistic  Wisdom  of  Solomon,  according 
to  which  the  body  is  an  encumbrance  to  the  vov^.  His 
doctrine  of  the  flesh  bears,  again,  a  close  analogy  to  the 
weaker  dualism  of  the  later  Jewish  theology,  according  to 
which,  while  the  soul  is  pure  by  nature,  the  body  is  impure, 
not  simply  as  perishable,  but  because  ifis  the  seat  of  the 
evil  impulse  called  the  jeser  Jiara,  which  is  to  it  what  the 
leaven  is  to  the  dough — a  fermenting,  impelling  power.J 

*  See  Dickson,  PatiVs  Use  of  the  Terms  Flesh  and  Spirit,  p.  112. 
t  N'etitestamentliche  Theologie,  ii.  p.  38. 
J  Weber,  System,  p.  221. 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  225 

This  is  counteracted,  however,  to  some  degree  by  the  good 
impulse  which  resides  in  the  soul,  and  which  in  excep- 
tional cases  was  thought  to  have  been  so  strengthened 
by  religious  exercises  as  completely  to  overcome  the  jeser 
Jiara.  The  idea,  finally,  that  the  flesh,  not  constituting  a 
part  of  the  real  personality  of  man,  is  doomed  to  perish, 
while  the  body  may,  by  means  of  the  indwelling  divine 
Spirit,  be  ''quickened"  into  a  crwyLta  irvevfjiaTLKov,  is  a 
distinctively  original  feature  of  the  Pauline  anthropology. 
The  ''  redemption  of  the  body  "  is  a  specifically  Christian 
conception,  and  rests  upon  the  central  doctrine  of  the 
Pauline  theology  that  Christ  became  in  his  resurrection  the 
head  of  a  new  order  of  the  Spirit  and  of  life,  which  was 
intended  through  faith  to  overcome  the  Adamic  order  of 
sin  and  death. 

The  interpretation  of  adp^  which  finds  it  to  denote  not 
the  substance  of  the  physical  or  ''natural"  body,  but  "the 
weak  and  creaturely  side  of  our  nature"  is  objectionable, 
because  it  separates  the  apostle's  physical  and  ethical 
anthropology  at  the  foundation.  It  yields  a  result  which  is 
altogether  vague  and  confusing  and  a  definition  which  it- 
self needs  to  be  defined.  What  is  this  weak  and  creaturely 
side  of  human  nature  in  view  of  the  fundamental  distinc- 
tions of  the  outward  and  the  inward  man  .?  Paul  employs 
no  language  which  naturally  yields  itself  to  this  interpreta- 
tion. He  says  in  so  many  words  :  "Let  not  sin,  therefore, 
reign  in  your  mortal  body,  that  ye  should  obey  it  in  the 
lusts  thereof,"  where  awixa  means  the  flesh  as  organised 
in  the  psychical  or  natural  body.  So  long  as  the  Christians 
were  in  this  physical  body,  and  had  not  yet  the  crw/xa 
irvev jxariKov  (spiritual  body),  they  were  in  danger  of  yield- 
ing to  its  "lusts  "  and  of  making  their  "members  "  instru- 
ments of  unrighteousness  on  account  of  the  "infirmity"  of 
their  "flesh  "  (Rom.  vi.  12,  13,  19).  The  law  in  the  mem- 
Q 


226  THE    TEACHER 

bers  which  wars  against  the  law  of  the  mind  (Rom.  vii.  23) 
is  the  mode  of  operation  of  the  lusts  of  the  flesh  proceed- 
ing with  the  fateful  regularity  of  a  natural  necessity.  With 
the  lusts  of  the  flesh  and  the  lusts  of  the  body  as  inter- 
changeable terms  there  can  be  no  question  that  the  aap^ 
is  conceived  as  the  body  organised  for  its  temporal  exist- 
ence. (Compare  Rom.  vi.  12  and  xiii.  14.)  "The  likeness 
of  sinful  flesh  "  {aap/co^;  afiapria^)  in  which  Christ  is  said 
to  have  appeared  (Rom.  viii.  3)  evidently  has  reference  to 
his  physical  being  as  a  man,  and  not  to  *'the  weak  and 
creaturely  side  of  his  nature,"  however  we  may  interpret 
the  difficult  ofjLoicofia  (likeness).  It  was,  moreover,  **  in  the 
flesh"  of  Christ  on  the  cross  that  the  judgment  of  con- 
demnation upon  sin  was  executed.  It  is  only  when  we 
regard  the  flesh  not  as  a  vague  ''side  of  human  nature," 
but  as  a  definite  part  of  it,  that  the  opposition  of  the  adp^ 
and  the  TrvevfjLa,  i.e.,  the  divine  Spirit,  which  occupies  so 
conspicuous  a  place  in  the  apostle's  theology,  has  a  clearly 
defined  significance.  In  this  grand  ethical  antithesis  the 
outward,  psychical,  sarkical  man,  the  earthly,  material  man, 
with  stormy  passions  and  fateful  lusts,  is  conceived  as  at 
warfare  with  the  inward  man,  the  vov^  and  the  human 
irveviia,  in  which  the  Spirit  of  God  finds  an  abode. 

The  conflict  is  represented  in  the  apostle's  thought  as 
one  power,  one  substance,  contending  against  another 
power  and  substance,  each  having  its  spontaneous  and  con- 
tradictory impulses  and  desires.  The  issue  of  the  tragic 
contest  is  determined  according  as  on  the  one  hand  ''the 
lusts  of  the  flesh,"  "the  law  in  the  members"  (Rom.  vii. 
23  ;  Gal.  v.  16),  or  on  the  other  the  forces  of  the  divine 
TTvevfia  preponderate  :  "  For  if  ye  live  after  the  flesh  ye 
shall  die ;  but  if  ye  through  the  spirit  do  mortify  the  deeds 
of  the  body  ye  shall  live"  (Rom.  viii.  13).  The  funda- 
mental relation  of  the  physical  and   ethical  sides  of  the 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  22/ 

apostle's  anthropology  is  apparent  in  the  employment  al- 
ready mentioned  of  the  attributive  terms  derived  from 
Gap^^  adpicLvo^^  consisting  of  flesh  as  to  the  outward  man, 
and  aap/ctKo^,  morally  fleshly  so  far  as  the  subject  is  de- 
termined in  his  activity  by  the  lusts  of  his  sarkical  nature. 
Because  he  is  adp/ctpo^,  fleshly  as  to  the  physical  substance 
of  his  being,  he  is  aap/ccKo^,  fleshly,  as  to  the  quality  of 
his  ethical  life,  i.e.,  living  in  the  flesh,  he  walks  according 
to  the  flesh,  unless  the  divine  Spirit  intervenes,  and  ''cuts 
the  causal  nexus"  between  the  nature  which  is  GctpKivo^ 
and  the  actions  which  are  aap/cL/cd  (Rom.  iv.  12  ;  2  Cor. 
X.  3).  A  few  terse  words  in  the  pathetic  and  impassioned 
passage,  Rom.  vii.  14-25,  indicate  the  relation  between  the 
flesh,  as  such,  and  sin  —  a  relation  inseparable,  except 
through  the  supernatural  intervention  of  the  divine  Trvevfia 
—  "But  I  am  of  flesh  (^adpKivo^),  sold  under  sin,"  where 
the  relation  of  the  two  clauses  evidently  is  that  the  former 
gives  the  reason  for  the  latter — because  I  am  of  flesh,  I 
am  sold  under  sin,  doomed  like  a  slave  to  its  dread  do- 
minion, so  that  even  "the  law  of  the  mind"  is  ineffective 
against  the  fatal  "law  in  the  members." 

The  objection  to  the  interpretation  of  cdp^  herein  de- 
fended on  the  ground  of  2  Cor.  vii.  i,  "Let  us  cleanse 
ourselves  from  all  filthiness  [defilement]  of  the  flesh," 
rests  upon  an  erroneous  idea  of  the  relation  of  sin  to  the 
flesh  in  the  thought  of  the  apostle,  and  upon  a  misappre- 
hension of  the  passage  itself.  Dickson's  difliculty  is  thus 
disposed  of,*  who  errs  and  confuses  the  whole  matter  in 
supposing  that  in  the  interpretation  which  he  opposes  sin 
and  the  flesh  are  identified,  instead  of  the  latter  being 
regarded  as  the  seat  of  the  former.  The  judgment  of 
Dr.  Schmiedel  that  the  words  are  "certainly  unpauline," 
results  from  a  too  rigorous  application  of  the  term  "  flesh," 
*Zc?^.  aV.,  pp.  310,  313. 


228  THE    TEACHER 

as  distinct  from  the  ''body,"  conceived  to  mean  the  flesh 
as  organised  in  the  human  earthly  existence.*  **The 
flesh,"  he  remarks,  "  is  defiled,  and  hence  one  can  only 
speak  of  a  cleansing  of  it  when  in  conversion  it  should  be 
set  free  from  sin.  ...  In  fact,  then,  it  comes  to  this  : 
that  this  power  of  sin  is  suppressed  in  Christians  through 
the  Spirit  of  God;  removed  out  of  the  flesh  it  is  not." 
"Only  the  body,"  he  says  further,  *'is  the  temple  of  the 
Holy  Spirit  and  capable  of  holiness"  (i  Cor.  vi.  19 ;  vii.  34). 
But  it  is  an  error  to  suppose  that  Paul  makes  a  rig- 
orous distinction  between  the  aap^  and  the  aoiixa  and  its 
''members"  in  relation  to  the  seat  of  sin.  What  differ- 
ence exists  in  his  thought  between  "the  law  in  the 
members"  and  the  uniform  and  necessary  working  of  the 
lusts  of  the  flesh }  The  body,  w^ich  may  become  the  tem- 
ple of  the  Holy  Spirit,  is  the  body  of  flesh,  and  those  who 
are  not  "  in  the  flesh,"  since  the  Spirit  of  God  dwells  in 
them,  who  have  "crucified  the  flesh"  (Rom.  viii.  9;  Gal. 
V.  24),  are  in  peril  of  yielding  their  "  members  as  instru- 
ments of  unrighteousness"  (Rom.  vi.  13).  To  be  "holy 
both  in  body  and  spirit"  (i  Cor.  vii.  34)  is  the  same  thing  as 
to  be  cleansed  from  all  defilement  of  the  flesh  and  spirit, 
and  to  have  the  members  as  "instruments  of  righteous- 
ness." If,  however,  the  meaning  of  the  passage  were 
necessarily,  "  Let  us  cleanse  ourselves  from  all  defile- 
ment that  may  come  to  the  flesh  and  spirit,"  then  defile- 
ment of  flesh  might  be  regarded  as  unpauline,  since  the 
flesh  is  by  nature  already  defiled.  But  if  we  may  render  it 
in  the  sense  that  the  apostle  exhorted  the  Corinthians  to 
cleanse  themselves  from  all  defilement  which  inheres  in 
the  flesh  as  the  seat  of  sin,  and  may  taint  the  spirit 
through  its  connection  with  the  flesh,  then  the  passage  is 
in  accord  with  the  Pauline  doctrine  that  even  the  believers, 

"^  Hand-Cominentar,  on  the  passage. 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  229 

whose  flesh  had  been  crucified  with  Christ,  were  still  in 
peril  from  it  (Rom.  vi.  12,  13,  19). 

In  view  of  all  the  foregoing  considerations,  the  judgment 
of  Holtzmann  does  not  appear  to  be  expressed  with  too 
much  vigour  when  he  says  :  ''  When  a  writer  so  plainly 
gives  his  readers  to  understand  that  by  *  flesh '  he  really 
means  flesh,  and  nothing  but  flesh  ;  that  for  the  elucida- 
tion of  his  meaning  he  speaks  occasionally  of  'deeds  of 
the  body'  (Rom.  viii.  13,  actually  not  different  from  'the 
works  of  the  flesh,'  Gal.  v.  19),  and  of  'the  law  of  sin 
in  the  members'  (in  them  dwells  sin,  as  in  the  flesh, 
Rom.  viii.  18,  23),  then  it  is  not  he,  at  least,  who  is  to 
blame,  but  the  determination  of  his  theological  exposi- 
tors to  misunderstand  him,  ....  when  to  his  words 
the  only  sense  which  they  can  have  is  continually  de- 
nied, and  from  the  throughout  clear  and  unitary  concep- 
tion which  they  express  is  derived  an  understanding  that 
is  arbitrarily  changing,  contradictory,  and  with  difficulty 
intelligible."  *  The  objection  which  is  raised  on  the 
ground  that  in  Gal.  v.  19  ff.,  referred  to  in  the  foregoing- 
quotation,  other  sins  are  mentioned  than  those  proceeding 
immediately  from  the  aap^  literally  regarded,  is  invalid, 
because  it  would  be  manifestly  unjust  to  such  a  thinker  as 
Paul  to  require  that  if  he  regarded  the  sensuous  nature  as 
the  seat  of  sin,  its  manifestations  must  be  directly  related 
to  the  body  alone,  and  not  allowed  a  wider  range  into  the 
domain  of  thought  and  feeling.  It  has  already  been 
pointed  out  that  the  apostle  thought  man  to  be  sold 
under  sin,"  in  bondage  to  it,  because  he  was  adp/civo^  or  of 
flesh.  But  the  "sin"  in  question  in  this  passage  is  sin  in 
general,  and  not  sin  specifically  related  to  the  physical 
nature.  The  physical  basis  is  not,  however,  lost  sight  of, 
and  in  fact  the  list  of  "works  of  the  flesh"  in  the  passage 

*  A^eutesta77ientliche  Theologies  ii.  p.  40. 


230  THE    TEACHER 

under  consideration  begins  and  ends  with  offences  of  a 
directly  sensuous  character.  Man,  being  by  nature 
o-dpKLvo<i,  becomes  ethically  aapfci/co^  or  carnal  in  the 
entire  scope  of  his  activity,  and  this  sarkical  quality  of  his 
acts  exists  precisely  and  only  because  he  is  "of  flesh." 
Moreover,  are  we  able  to  determine  categorically,  with  our 
present  knowledge  of  psychical  phenomena,  what  con- 
nection ''hatred,  wrath,  and  strife"  have  with  the  physical 
nature,  or  dare  we  affirm  dogmatically  that  they  have  none  ? 
The  latent  sin  which  has  its  seat  in  the  flesh  is  brought 
into  activity,  ''revived"  (Rom,  vii.  9),  through  the  agency 
of  the  "law."  By  the  term  v6/jlo^  or  6  vo/xo^  Paul  under- 
stands primarily  the  Mosaic  legislation,  moral  and  cere- 
monial, includes  under  it,  however,  the  Old  Testament 
Scriptures  generally,  and  recognises  an  inward  law  where 
no  outward  commandment  has  been  given  in  Rom.  ii.  9  : 
"  For  when  the  gentiles,  who  have  no  law,  do  by  nature 
the  things  contained  in  the  law,  these  not  having  a  law 
[i.e.,  according  to  the  Jewish  idea  of  the  law  as  an  express 
injunction],  are  a  law  unto  themselves."  This  last  view  of 
law,  which  was  current  among  the  Greeks,  has  an  impor- 
tant relation,  as  will  appear  further  on,  to  the  apostle's 
doctrine  of  the  entrance  of  sin  and  death  into  the  world. 
With  all  his  depreciation  of  the  law,  Paul  concedes  so 
much  to  the  genius  of  his  race  out  of  which  it  sprang  as  to 
declare  it  to  be  "spiritual"  and  "holy,  just,  and  good."  It 
is,  however,  ineffective  in  spiritual  results,  because  man  is 
"of  flesh"  (adpKivo^,  Rom.  vii.  14).  It  cannot  stop  the 
course  of  sin  and  produce  righteousness,  because  it  is 
"  weak  through  the  flesh  "  (Rom.  viii.  3),  powerless  against 
the  lusts  of  the  a-dp^,  by  whose  force  its  divine  ordinances 
are  swept  aside,  so  that  it  is  totally  inoperative  "to  make 
alive"  (S'woTTOiTJcrat,  Gal.  iii.  21).  Though  man  may  "delight 
in  the  law  of  God  "  according  to  the  v6iio<^  rov  voo^  (the  law 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  23 1 

of  the  mind),  the  other  law  in  his  "  members  "  overcomes 
the  good  impulses  of  the  'Mnind,"  and  he  can  only  cry  out 
in  impotent  despair  :  ''  O  wretched  man  that  I  am,  who 
shall  deliver  me  from  this  body  of  death  ?"  (Rom.  vii.  24.) 
Thus  he  finds  the  commandment,  which  was  ordained  to 
life,  to  be  unto  death  (Rom.  vii.  10). 

But  Paul  does  not  stop  here  in  his  exposition  of  the  re- 
lation of  the  law  to  sin.  Not  only  is  it  unable  to  "  make 
alive,"  i.e.,  although  ''  spiritual  "  and  "  holy,"  to  effect 
righteousness,  but  it  also  actually  produces  subjective  sin 
or  transgression,  since  through  it  comes  the  knowledge  of 
sin,  the  consciousness  that  the  impulses  of  the  flesh  which 
without  the  law  take  their  inevitable  course  by  natural 
necessity,  are  in  fact  sinful.  **  The  motions  of  sin  "  are 
"by  the  law,"  and  without  it  man  would  never  have  known 
sin,  for  ''  I  had  not  known  lust  [as  such]  except  the  law 
had  said  'Thou  shalt  not  covet  '  "  (Rom.  vii.  5,  7).  It  is 
through  ''the  commandment  "  that  the  sin  which  was  as 
such  before  inoperative  "took  occasion,"  and  "wrought  all 
manner  of  concupiscence."  "For  without  the  law  sin  was 
[is]  dead  "  (Rom.  vii.  8).  This  is  a  general  proposition  re- 
garding sin  and  the  law,  and  is  to  the  same  purport  as  the 
declaration  that  "sin  is  not  imputed  where  there  is  no 
lav/  "  (Rom.  v.  13).  Without  the  law,  by  which  the  apostle 
probably  means  an  express  commandment,  the  lusts  of  the 
flesh  in  their  nature  sinful,  partaking  of  ajxaprLa,  pursue 
their  natural  course  blindly,  and  the  man  is  "alive  "(lives), 
but  "  when  the  commandment  came,  sin  revived  "  and  the 
man  "died,"  i.e.,  became  subject  to  death  (Rom.  vii.  9). 
Whether  if  "the  commandment"  had  not  come  man  would 
have  lived  forever  in  this  merely  animal  existence  without 
moral  consciousness  is  a  question  which  Paul  neither 
raises  nor  answers,  and  which  we  may  pass  by  for  the 
present    at  least.     It  should,  however,  be  remarked  that 


"i. 


232  THE    TEACHER 

if  he  had  in  mind  the  human  race  prior  to  the  giving  of  the 
law  through  Moses,  he  is  not  consistent  with  himself  in 
giving  this  alone  a  place  in  the  scheme  ;  for  he  recognises 
for  the  gentiles  an  inward  law  and  a  conscience  according 
to  which  they  are  held  responsible  (Rom.  ii.  14-16).  Per- 
haps there  hovered  before  his  mind  the  Adamic  legend  of 
the  innocent  childhood  of  the  race  or  the  thought  of  the 
childhood  of  the  individual  before  the  dawn  of  conscience. 
In  any  case  the  6  voyiO'^  in  verse  12,  which  evidently  means 
the  Mosaic  law,  and  the  occurrence  of  "  commandment  " 
{ivToXrj)  repeatedly  in  verses  9-13,  which  he  does  not  em- 
ploy to  designate  the  inner  law  (Rom.  xiii.  9;  i  Cor.  vii. 
19,  xiv.  37),  create  a  difficulty  for  which  there  appears  to 
be  no  solution  without  violence  to  the  natural  sense  of  the 
passage.  We  might,  indeed,  suppose  the  apostle  to  have 
regarded  the  law  of  the  conscience  unenlightened  by  divine 
revelation  as  carrying  an  ivToXtj  by  implication,  but  this  is 
a  gratuitous  expedient,  and  the  probability  is  that  the  ques- 
tion in  hand  did  not  present  itself  to  him  at  all. 

Paul's  teaching  regarding  the  entrance  of  sin  into  the 
world  is  one  of  the  most  difficult  and  most  disputed  points 
of  his  theology ;  yet,  as  before  remarked,  he  does  not  set 
out  to  formulate  a  specific  doctrine  on  the  subject.  The 
matter  involves  the  questions  :  whether  he  means  to  teach 
that  sin  first  made  its  appearance  in  the  world  through 
Adam's  transgression,  whether  in  that  transgression  was 
implied  a  "fall"  of  Adam  in  the  traditional  sense  of  the 
term  and  a  radical  change  of  human  nature,  whether  in 
the  sin  of  the  progenitor  as  the  federal  head  of  the  race  all 
men  sinned,  and  whether  sin  is  to  be  regarded  as  belonging 
originally  to  the  divine  order  of  human  existence  or  as 
chargeable  to  man's  free  activity.  The  classical  passage 
on  the  subject  is  the  much-disputed  Rom.  v.  12-19,  v^hich 
opens  with  the  declaration  that  *'as  by  one  man  sin  entered 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN 


233 


into  the  world,  and  death  by  sin,  and  so  death  passed  upon 
all  men,  for  that  all  sinned  ;  "  the  thought  is  here  broken  off 
to  be  resumed  in  the  eighteenth  verse,  where  the  parallel 
between  Adam  and  Christ  is  carried  out.  That  the  apostle 
does  not  here  mean  that  sin  came  into  the  world  through 
Adam  as  a  man  having  the  fleshly  nature  (adp/avo^)^  and 
thus  beginning  an  order  of  life  in  which  sinfulness  or  sin 
as  an  objective  power  was  to  prevail,  is  evident  from  the 
fact  that  in  verses  17,  18,  and  19  he  speaks  of  Adam's 
"offence"  and  "disobedience."  He  has  in  mind,  then, 
Adam's  transgression  of  the  divine  commandment  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  account  in  Genesis.  Through  this 
transgression,  he  declares,  death  (physical  death  without 
hope  of  resurrection  except  through  "  the  last  Adam,"  the 
"life-giving  spirit,"  i  Cor.  xv.  45)  passed  upon  or  unto  all 
men,  for  that  all  sinned. 

The  a^ux  interpretuni  of  this  passage  is  the  expression 
ec/)'  S  7rdvT€^  rj/j^aprov,  which  can  only  mean,  "inasmuch  as 
[because]  all  sinned"  (2  Cor.  v.  4;  Phil.  iii.  12),  and  the 
central  question  is  whether  Adam's  sin  is  regarded  as  the 
sin  of  all,  or  all  are  declared  to  have  sinned  individually. 
The  former  interpretation  is  without  support  in  the  Greek 
text  since  e(^'  S  does  not  mean  "in  whom,"  and  since  to 
supply  "in  him"  after  "sinned"  is  to  read  a  new  idea  into 
the  passage.  The  simple  statement  is  that  "all  sinned" 
as  the  reason  why  all  are  subject  to  death,  and  ^aul  never 
employs  the  verb  "to  sin  "  (dfiaprdvco)  in  any  other  sense 
than  that  of  individual  transgression.  Accordingly,  the 
meaning  is  not  that  all  men  became  sinful  at  the  same 
time  with  Adam  and  through  his  sin.  Nevertheless,  the 
expression  "by  one  man"  must  have  its  rights,  so  that 
the  sin  of  Adam  shall  not  be  cut  off  from  connection  with 
the  sin  of  his  posterity,  and  the  transgressions  of  the  latter 
for  which  they  suffer  death  be  regarded  as  independent  of 


234  ^^^    TEACHER 

his  ''offence."  Otherwise  the  argument  of  the  entire 
section  would  be  destroyed,  which  draws  a  parallel  between 
Adam  and  Christ  as  the  respective  heads  of  the  two  world- 
orders  of  sin  and  death  and  righteousness  and  life  ;  and  as 
men  do  not  and  cannot  attain  salvation  without  connection 
with,  "the  last  Adam,"  so  they  are  not  conceived  as  bring- 
ing destruction  upon  themselves  or  as  being  naturally 
subject  to  death  independently  of  "the  first  Adam."  "As 
in  Adam  {i.e.,  on  the  ground  of  Adam]  all  die,  so  in  Christ 
shall  all  be  made  alive."  "For  as  by  one  man's  disobe- 
dience many  were  made  sinners,  so  by  the  obedience  of 
one  shall  many  be  made  righteous"  (i  Cor.  xv.  22;  Rom. 
V.  19). 

If,  however,  under  the  new  order  men  do  not  become 
righteous  simply  because  of  the  righteousness  of  Christ 
and  without  their  own  choice,  neither  under  the  old  order 
did  Paul  think  them  to  be  subject  to  death  without  their 
own  acts  of  sin.  Each  representative  head  is  conceived 
only  as  the  occasion  of  the  results  of  his  work,  on  the  one 
hand  in  the  tragic  order  of  death,  and  on  the  other  in  the 
blessed  order  of  life  —  the  occasion  indispensable  to  all  that 
follows  in  either  order.  It  may  be  questioned  whether 
Pfleiderer  does  not  state  the  case  too  strongly  when  he 
says  that  the  sin  of  Adam's  posterity  is  regarded  as  "the 
necessary  consequence  "  of  the  sin  of  the  first  man  {Paul- 
inismus,  2te  Aufl.,  p.  54).  It  does  not  necessarily  follow 
from  the  employment  of  the  aorist  rjixaprov  that  the  sinning 
of  all  is  conceived  as  contained  in  that  of  Adam,  although 
this  sense  must  be  conceded  as  grammatically  possible.  It 
is  not,  however,  the  only  grammatically  defensible  sense. 
The  aorist  is  technically  not  used  for  the  perfect,  and 
"have  sinned"  may  be  an  incorrect  translation  if  one  will 
be  excessively  exact.  But  strict  accuracy  is  not  always 
observed  in  the  use  of  the  aorist,  and  this  tense  is  often 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  235 

employed  when  a  connection  with  the  present  closely 
analogous  to  our  perfect  is  intended.  It  would  not  be 
regarded  as  a  gross  inaccuracy  to  translate  in  Luke  i.  i, 
eirex<^ipT)(Tav  ♦'  have  taken  in  hand,"  or  to  make  one  invited 
guest  say  in  xiv.  19,  "  I  have  bought  a  field,"  and  another, 
'*I  have  married  a  wife."  (So  in  each  case  the  Revised 
Version.)  Moreover,  Paul  himself  says:  **  For  all  have 
sinned  and  are  come  short  of  the  glory  of  God  "  (Rom.  iii. 
23),  where  rj/jLaprov  certainly  does  not  denote  such  a  definite 
past  act  filling  only  one  point  of  time  as  is  claimed  for  it  in 
the  passage  in  question,  but  means  that  all  began  to  sin  in 
some  past  time  and  have  continued  sinning  till  at  the 
present,  as  before,  they  are  in  the  condition  mentioned. 
The  perfect  tense  could  not  express  this  idea  more  clearly. 
In  fact  the  perfect  of  d/jbaprdva}  is  rarely  used  in  the  New 
Testament  and  not  at  all  by  Paul  except  in  the  participial 
form,  while  the  aorist  is  repeatedly  employed  in  connec- 
tions in  which  our  perfect  would  be  the  accurate  equivalent 
(Luke  XV.  18,  21;  Rom.  ii.  12;  i  Cor.  vii.  28,  '*  If  thou 
marry,  thou  hast  not  sinned  "  i^/^apre?).  In  almost  every 
place  except  Rom.  v.  12  the  revisers  have  rendered  the 
aorist  of  dfiaprdvo)  by  the  perfect  tense.  Why  not  there  ? 
The  apostle's  teaching  on  this  subject  has  a  point  and 
vividness  which  are  doubtless  due  to  his  own  experience  of 
sin  and  to  his  conversion,  and  it  may  be  regarded  as  his 
original  contribution  to  hamartiology.  The  doctrine  was 
certainly  remote  from  the  Jewish  point  of  view  and  even 
antagonistic  to  the  thought  and  feeling  of  a  Jew  that  sin 
became  exceeding  sinful  by  the  commandment,  and  that 
the  law  was  given  for  the  express  purpose  of  making  "the 
offence  abound"  (Rom.  v.  20,  vii.  13).  The  sin  that  is  in 
the  flesh  is  brought  to  life  through  the  presence  of  the 
commandment,  and  rushes  forth  into  every  forbidden  field 
simply    because   of    the    prohibition.      The    objective   sin 


236  THE    TEACHER 

becomes  subjective,  the  *' material  sin"  becomes  "formal," 
All  that  Paul  says,  however,  on  the  law  and  sin  is  inci- 
dental to  a  purpose  to  which  any  specific  doctrine  of  sin 
was  for  him  subordinate,  to  show,  namely,  that  righteous- 
ness is  unattainable  through  the  law.  If  the  law  can  do 
nothing  but  make  men  sinners  and  expose  them  to  death 
and  the  wrath  of  God,  it  certainly  does  not  open  a  way  to 
eternal  life.  The  entire  observance  of  its  requirements  is 
impossible.  The  more  a  man  knows  of  it  the  wider  yawns 
the  chasm  within  him  between  ideal  and  achievement, 
between  what  the  law  of  his  mind  requires  and  what  the 
law  in  his  members  fatally  compels  him  to  do. 

It  is  an  error,  however,  to  suppose  that  Paul  thought  the 
law  to  be  imperfect  as  a  law  or  an  incomplete  disclosure  of 
the  divine  will.  The  Old  Testament  was  to  him  the  per- 
fect word  of  God.  Accordingly,  if  the  law  was  a  pedagogue 
to  lead  men  to  Christ,  it  had  this  ofifice  in  the  sense  that  it 
was  intended  to  hold  them  in  subjection,  convict  them  of 
sin,  show  them  their  inability  to  save  themselves  by  their 
own  works,  and  fling  them  at  last  upon  Christ  who 
abolished  the  old  law  and  revealed  the  new  law  of  the 
Spirit  and  of  life.  He  therefore,  as  Weizsacker  remarks, 
"accepted  the  paradox  involved  in  the  two  propositions, 
that  the  law  contains  the  commands  of  God  by  whose 
fulfilment  man  obtains  life  and  righteousness,  and  that  as 
a  matter  of  fact  its  only  effect  was  to  produce  the  know- 
ledge of  sin."  The  solution  of  this  paradox  is  superficial 
according  to  which  the  law  is  conceived  as  "  spiritual "  and 
given  "unto  life,"  but  performs  a  transitional  function  in 
producing  the  knowledge  of  sin  and  in  showing  to  man  the 
impossibility  of  salvation  by  works,  in  order  to  prepare  the 
way  for  salvation  under  the  new  dispensation,  and  so  in 
fact  to  fulfil  its  original  purpose.  An  incidental  result  of 
the  law,  that  Paul  himself  discovered,  does  not  invalidate 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  237 

its  original  intention,  which  he  declares  in  the  most  precise 
terms  to  have  been  "to  life"  (et?  ^(orjv);  and  yet  in  the 
same  breath  he  asserts  that  he  had  found  the  law  to  be 
"unto  death"  (et?  Odvarov,  Rom.  vii.  10).  A  divine  ordi- 
nance produces  a  result  directly  the  opposite  of  its  original 
intention!  Verse  13  does  not  resolve  the  paradox,  for 
although  he  there  says  that  not  the  law  which  is  good  is 
the  occasion  of  death  to  him,  but  rather  sin,  the  responsi- 
bility still  falls  upon  the  law,  since  it  was  given  in  order 
that  sin  might  abound.  If  "the  sting  of  death  is  sin," 
"the  strength  of  sin  is  the  law"  (Cor.  xv.  56). 

To  the  question  which  one  of  the  two  terms  of  the 
antinomy  under  consideration  is  supported  by  the  historico- 
religious  facts  relative  to  the  law  the  apostle  himself 
furnishes  the  only  valid  answer  when  he  says  that  this  was 
given  "unto  life."  From  the  point  of  view  of  the  Old 
Testament  the  law  was  unquestionably  given  not  to  make 
"sin  abound,"  but  to  produce  righteousness.  Obedience 
is  not  therein  enjoined  by  the  voice  of  teachers  and 
prophets  from  age  to  age  as  if  it  were  an  impossibility,  but 
as  an  achievement  within  the  power  of  men.  Actual  right- 
eousness achieved  by  conforming  through  good  works  to 
the  will  of  God  is  not  enforced  by  unremitting  warning 
and  exhortation  as  if  it  were  an  unattainable  ideal,  but  as 
a  possible  accomplishment  of  which  many  shining  examples 
exist.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  add  that  the  teaching  of 
Jesus  in  this  regard  is  in  accord  with  that  of  the  illustrious 
representatives  of  the  genius  of  the  old  Hebrew  morality 
and  religion  (Matt.  v.  19,  vii.  21,  viii.  50,  xix.  16-21  ; 
Luke  xvi.  29).  Even  Paul  himself  occasionally  shows  that 
he  had  in  fact  "profited  in  the  Jews'  religion"  (Gal.  i.  14), 
and  echoes  the  mighty  voice  of  his  race,  when  he  for  the 
moment  loses  sight  of  the  dogmatic  purpose  which  led  him 
into  the  antinomy  in   question   (Rom.  ii.  6-13;    I  Cor.  iii. 


238  THE    TEACHER 

13,  V.  10;  Gal.  vi.  7).  Another  obscurity  appears  in  the 
connection  in  which  the  apostle  here  speaks  of  ''the  law" 
as  occasioning  sin  in  connection  with  the  flesh,  and  de- 
clares that  without  it  no  formal  sin  could  exist.  That  he 
has  in  mind,  as  before  remarked,  the  Mosaic  law,  and 
includes  its  moral  precepts  is  evident  from  the  words  :  "I 
had  not  known  lust  except  the  law  had  said,  '  Thou  shalt 
not  covet '  "  (Rom.  vii.  7).  Yet  he  recognises  sin  as  exist- 
ing in  an  aggravated  form  among  the  gentiles  "  who  have 
not  the  law,"  and  speaks  of  sinning  ''without  law"  (Rom. 
ii.  12,  14).  His  intense  preoccupation  with  polemical 
dialectic,  and  the  impetuous  rush  of  his  thought  toward 
the  end  that  this  proposed  for  him  furnishes  the  only 
explanation  of  such  paradoxes,  which  are  stumbling-blocks 
to  those  only  who  are  wanting  in  insight  into  the  nature 
and  the  absorbing  aims  of  the  great  apostle. 

The  interpretation  which  we  have  given  to  Rom.  v,  12 
is  the  only  one  consistent  with  verses  13  and  14  in  which 
the  apostle  proceeds  to  establish  the  proposition  that  all 
individually  sinned  :  "  For  until  the  law  sin  was  in  the 
world ;  but  sin  is  not  imputed  when  there  is  no  law. 
Nevertheless  death  reigned  from  Adam  until  Moses  even 
over  them  that  had  not  sinned  after  the  similitude  of 
Adam's  transgression."  This  does  not  mean,  as  Lipsius 
will  have  it,*  and  as  Meyer  maintains,  that  individuals 
were  not  punished  by  death  for  their  actual  sins  but  by 
reason  of  the  objective  transference  of  the  sin  of  Adam. 
This  might  be  Paul's  meaning  in  accordance  with  his 
doctrine  that  "  without  the  law  sin  is  dead  "  (Rom.  vii.  8), 
if  a  sin  that  is  "dead"  be  punishable,  but  why  should  he 
take  the  trouble  to  state  the  obvious  fact  that  sin  which  is 
not  sin  in  fact  and  in  form  is  not  "imputed".^  Meyer's 
remark    on    this   point,    which    is    irreconcilable    with   his 

*  Hand-  Coi7i7nentar,  on  the  passage. 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  239 

interpretation  of  the  passage  as  a  whole,  is  that  ''  in  the 
absence  of  the  law  the  action  which  in  and  by  itself  is 
unlawful  is  no  transgression  of  the  law  and  cannot,  there- 
fore, be  brought  into  account  as  such.''  * 

But  that  these  "actions"  performed  under  the  universal 
reign  of  d/juapTLa  were  regarded  by  Paul  as  individual  sins 
is  evident  from  Rom.  i.  19-32,  ii.  12.  They  were  viola- 
tions of  the  inner  law  by  those  who  knew  "the  judgment 
of  God  that  they  who  commit  such  things  are  worthy  of 
death  "  (Rom.  i.  32).  Besides,  in  the  passage  in  hand  he 
says  of  those  who  lived  before  the  giving  of  the  formal 
law  that  they  had  "sinned,"  although  not  like  Adam  by 
violating  an  express  outward  commandment.  This  cer- 
tainly is  not  a  sinning  "in  Adam."  The  death,  then,  that 
"reigned  from  Adam  until  Moses,"  reigned  over  all  because 

*  The  difficulties  presented  in  the  words,  "  Sin  is  not  imputed  where  there 
is  no  law,"  are  exceedingly  perplexing  whether  the  non-imputation  be  re- 
ferred to  God,  or  to  the  individual  conscience.  The  sinning  of  men  between 
Adam  and  Moses  is  explicitly  declared,  and  with  equal  explicitness  the  apostle 
affirms  that  those  who  sin  against  the  innner  law  htoiv  that  they  are  "  worthy 
of  death."  Hence  there  can  be  no  non-imputation  in  the  sinners'  conscience, 
and  if  they  are  "  worthy  of  death  "  their  sin  must  be  imputed  by  God.  Bovon 
objects  to  the  interpretation  herein  supported  that  it  makes  Paul  in  the  passage 
in  question  (Rom. v.  13,  14)  "withdraw  with  one  hand  what  he  gives  with  the 
other"  {Tkeologie  du  nouveau  Testament,  ii.  p.  268).  It  would  not,  however, 
surprise  any  one  who  is  familiar  with  the  Pauline  paradoxes  if  this  hypothesis 
were  found  to  be  necessary  to  the  solution  of  the  difficulties  which  according 
to  any  explanation  inhere  in  the  section.  It  is  futile  to  adduce  the  words 
"sin  is  not  imputed  where  there  is  no  law,"  in  support  of  the  doctrine  that 
according  to  Paul  the  men  over  whom  death  reigned  from  Adam  to  Moses 
bore  the  consequences,  not  of  their  own  sins,  but  of  the  transgression  of  the 
progenitor;  for  the  apostle  expressly  says  that  these  men  "sinned"  in  a  par- 
ticular way,  and  is,  moreover,  debarred  by  his  own  declarations  from  affirm- 
ing that  their  sins  were  not  "  imputed  "  because  there  was  no  "  law  "  in  the 
case.  He  declares  unequivocally  that  those  who  "  have  not  the  [Mosaic]  law 
are  a  law  unto  themselves,"  and  that  they  have  the  "  accusing  "  and  "  excus- 
ing "  "  conscience."  It  is  hardly  legitimate  for  an  expositor  to  take  advantage 
of  a  paradox  of  the  apostle's  in  order  to  support  a  theory  of  his  meaning  in  a 
given  passage. 


240  THE    TEACHER 

"all  sinned."  Meyer  remarks  that  the  Rabbinical  writers 
derived  universal  mortality  from  the  fall  of  Adam,  all 
having  sinned  in  him,  and  thinks  that  Paul's  doctrine  may 
have  had  its  roots  in  his  Jewish  training.  According  to 
Weber,  however,  the  Jewish  theologians  found  an  anti- 
nomy in  the  two  propositions  that  death  came  as  the  con- 
sequence of  Adam's  sin,  and  that  sin  is  not  inheritable. 
They  concluded  accordingly  that  death  has  power  over 
the  individual  only  on  the  ground  of  his  own  sin.*  Paul's 
teaching  also  was  that  death  came  into  the  world  as  the 
penalty  of  Adam's  offence,  and  that  since  penalty  can  be 
conceived  as  inflicted  only  where  there  is  actual  sin,  the 
death  of  his  descendants,  sin  not  being  transmissible,  was 
due  to  the  fact  that  all  had  sinned.  The  death  of  innocent 
children  is  not  taken  into  the  account. 

The  difficulties  which  inhere  in  the  Pauline  doctrine  of 
the  origin  of  sin  are  not,  however,  cleared  up  by  the 
passages  thus  far  considered.  It  cannot  be  denied  that 
in  Rom.  v.  12  ff.  the  apostle  speaks  of  sin  as  though  it  had 
no  existence  in  the  world  prior  to  Adam's  transgression, 
and  as  though  through  the  principle  of  solidarity  "  by 
some  sort  of  continuity  "  the  descendants  of  the  progeni- 
tor were  subject  to  sin  and  death  through  him.  Such 
expressions  as  *'  By  one  man's  offence  death  reigned ;  " 
'*  By  the  offence  of  one  judgment  came  upon  all  men  to 
condemnation,"  and  "■  By  one  man's  disobedience  many 
were  made  sinners"  (Rom.  v.  17,  18,  19),  indicate  that 
Adam's  act  is  conceived  not  as  the  act  of  an  isolated 
individual  from  which  no  consequences  follow  to  others, 
but  as  one  fraught  with  such  far-reaching  tragic  results  as 
can  proceed  only  from  the  head  of  the  race,  just  as  Christ's 
act  of  atonement  extended  to  the  whole  series  of  his  de- 
scendants   in    the    spiritual    order.     In    other   words,    the 

*  System,  pp.  240  f. 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  24 1 

teaching  appears  to  be  that  just  as  grace  could  not  "reign 
through  righteousness  unto  eternal  life"  except  "through 
Christ,"  "sin,"  and  so  "death"  as  its  consequence 
"reigned"  primarily  "by  one"  (Rom.  v.  17,  21).  If  in 
these  passages  the  origin  of  sin  in  the  descendants  of  Adam 
appears  to  lie  outside  themselves,  it  is  not  in  2  Cor.  xi.  3 
placed  in  the  progenitors  themselves,  but  in  the  serpent 
or  Satan,  in  which  evil  personality  Paul  evidently  believed 
(Rom.  xvi.  20;   I  Cor.  v.  5,  vii.  5  ;  2  Cor.  ii.  11,  i.  14). 

To  the  question  raised  by  Sabatier  *  :  "  Why,  then, 
did  not  the  apostle  say  that  sin  entered  into  the  world 
with  Satan  and  by  him  V  the  inquiry  may  be  proposed  to 
determine  what  he  does  mean  to  say  here  if  not  precisely 
this.  For,  according  to  Sabatier  himself,  he  here  follows 
the  Adamic  legend  in  Genesis  as  an  "  authority,"  and  that 
recognises  no  sin  either  objective  or  subjective  in  the  pro- 
genitors except  through  an  outward  seduction.  On  the 
other  hand,  according  to  a  series  of  passages  already  quoted 
and  elucidated,  the  apostle  regards  the  origin  of  "  formal " 
sin  in  the  individual  as  due  to  "material"  sin  residing  in 
the  flesh  in  connection  with  the  law  which  provokes  and 
calls  it  into  activity.  He  certainly  ascribes  to  all  the  de- 
scendants of  Adam  an  indwelling  principle  of  sin  which 
is  "dead"  until  the  law  brings  it  to  life.  And  this,  too, 
despite  the  principle  of  solidarity  and  some  sort  of  causal 
connection  of  the  first  sin  with  that  which  reigned  in  the 
world  subsequent  to  Adam,  he  appears  to  regard  as  the 
natural  condition  of  man.  The  first  man  Adam  was  only 
a  "living  soul"  {^yx^l\  ^^^  "earthy"  {yo'iico^\  and  had 
not  the  spiritual  quality  of  "the  second  man  from  heaven," 
otherwise  he  would  not  have  sinned.  In  the  divine  order 
"that  is  not  first  which  is  spiritual,  but  that  which  is  nat- 
ural," and  the  -^vx^i  and  the  irvevfia  represent  the  antithetic 

*  LApbtre  Paul,  3«ie  ed.,  1896,  p.  384. 


242  THE    TEACHER 

orders  of  life  (i  Cor.  xv.  45  f.).  "The  natural  {'^^vyj.KOi;^ 
man  receiveth  not  the  things  of  the  Spirit  of  God  "  (i  Cor. 
ii.  14),  i.e.y  he  is  essentially  aapKiKo^  because  he  is  "of 
the  flesh  "  {adpiavo^;),  and  "  no  good  thing  "  dwells  in  him, 
namely,  in  his  flesh,  but  rather  sin  ready  to  manifest  itself 
when  the  "occasion"  is  presented  "through  the  com- 
mandment," and  to  "  bring  forth  fruit  unto  death." 

It  is  a  natural  conclusion  from  these  premises  that  one 
at  least  of  the  apostle's  doctrines  of  the  origin  of  sin  was 
that  it  resided  primarily  in  the  nature  of  man  and  in  "the 
first  man  Adam  "  as  well  as  in  his  descendants.  If  this 
conception,  so  far  as  Adam  is  concerned,  does  not  appear 
in  the  account  of  the  first  sin  in  Genesis,  which  he  seems 
to  accept  in  ascribing  sin  to  the  temptation  or  deception 
of  Satan,  then  there  is  in  this  regard  if  not  an  antinomy 
at  least  a  gap  in  his  thought  which  he  has  not  formally 
filled.  That  he  believed  the  children  of  Adam  to  have 
"all  sinned"  in  the  same  way  and  for  the  same  reason, 
i.e.y  because  they  had  like  him  the  evil  impulse  in  the 
flesh,  is  evident  from  the  foregoing  considerations.  There 
is,  then,  no  solution  of  the  antinomy  which  is  contained  in 
this  proposition  and  in  the  other  that  sin  and  death  came 
to  men  through  Adam,  except  on  the  assumption  that  their 
fleshly  nature,  their  evil  impulses,  were  inherited  from 
him.  But  Paul  nowhere  intimates  the  doctrine  that  either 
the  nature  of  Adam  or  that  of  his  descendants  underwent 
a  change  by  reason  of  the  first  transgression.  We  must 
conclude  accordingly,  that  his  teaching,  as  we  have  it, 
furnishes  no  means  of  resolving  this  paradox. 

That  the  traditional  doctrine  of  the  fall  of  man  is  not 
taught  by  Paul  is  not  only  based  upon  exegesis,  according 
to  which  such  a  teaching  would  be  incompatible  with  the 
idea  that  man  was  originally  "earthy,"  i.e.,  the  opposite 
of  "spiritual,"  but  also  upon  the  natural  and  obvious  phi- 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  243 

losophy  of  the  matter  derivable  from  the  reasoning  of  the 
apostle.  For  assuming  the  premises  from  which  he  pro- 
ceeds, the  Eden-legend,  the  absence  of  fleshly  or  sinful 
impulses  in  "■  the  first  man  "  leaves  the  beginning  of  sin 
inexplicable.  That  this  difficulty  inheres  in  the  Genesis- 
story,  and  that  Paul  appears  once  to  have  overlooked  it, 
need  not  enter  into  the  consideration.  Enough,  that  it  is 
a  fundamental  principle  of  his  thought  that  only  the  man 
can  be  superior  to  the  flesh  and  sin  in  whom  dwells  the 
life-giving  Spirit  imparted  through  Christ.  Sin  inheres 
in  the  flesh  of  the  psychical  or  natural  man,  and  it  is  from 
the  fleshly  nature  that  sin  proceeds,  that  is,  it  is  grounded 
in  the  original  constitution  of  man.  Sin  did  not  make 
man  fleshly  through  "the  fall,"  but  he  sinned  first,  and 
has  always  sinned,  because  of  the  flesh.  The  law  is  spirit- 
ual, but  man  is  carnal,  sold  under  sin.  According  to  the 
inner  man  he  aspires  and  strives  toward  the  service  of 
God  in  which  his  mind  delights,  but  the  law  in  his  mem- 
bers brings  him  into  captivity  to  the  law  of  sin  and  death 
which  is  in  his  members,  so  that  he  does  what  he  would 
not  and  what  he  hates.  ''  In  no  place,"  says  Weizsacker, 
"  where  the  antithesis  of  flesh  and  Spirit  is  broadly  dis- 
cussed is  there  any  hint  that  the  flesh,  considered  in  its 
morah  aspect,  is  a  secondary  growth  {ein  Gcivordenes).  It 
is  only  its  full  moral  influence  that  is  to  be  thought  of  as 
a  later  development.  .  .  .  But  the  law  is  incapable  of 
attaining  its  object.  It  was  weak  on  account  of  the  flesh 
(Rom.  viii.  3).  After  all  this  there  can  hardly  be  a  doubt 
that  for  Paul  the  antithesis  of  flesh  and  Spirit  ultimately 
rests  on  the  nature  of  the  flesh,  that  is,  on  the  natural 
quality  of  man."  * 

We  are  thus  led  to  the  conclusion  that  according  to  a 
fundamental  doctrine  of  Paul's  man  cannot  be  regarded  as 

*  Apost.  Zeitalter,  p.  131. 


244  ^^^    TEACHER 

naturally  immortal.  It  was  "by  man"  that  death  came, 
by  "  the  first  man,"  who  was  "  earthy  "  and  as  such  by 
nature  doomed  to  corruption  (<f>9opd).  "  In  Adam  all  die." 
Life,  incorruption,  the  glory  of  the  blessed  in  the  Mes- 
sianic kingdom,  the  resurrection,  pertain  only  to  those 
who,  through  having  accepted  Christ,  have  "the  earnest 
[pledge]  of  the  Spirit,"  and  who  can  hopefully  wait  for 
"the  redemption"  of  their  bodies  (Rom.  viii.  23).  Even 
believers,  though  possessing  "the  Spirit,"  are  conceived 
as  subject  to  physical  death,  and  it  was  only  when  Christ 
should  come  for  the  resurrection  that  the  dead  would  be 
"raised  incorruptible,"  and  the  saints  then  living  would 
"be  changed"  (i  Cor.  xv.  52).  Incorruptibility  belongs 
only  to  the  kingdom  of  God,  which  "flesh  and  blood  can- 
not inherit."  The  body,  which  is  mortal  by  reason  of 
having  the  flesh  as  its  substance,  becomes  triumphant 
over  death  only  when  "quickened"  by  the  indwelling 
Spirit  of  God.  This  is  only  another  way  of  saying  that 
the  body  of  the  believer  conceived  as  a  form  will  have  at 
the  resurrection  an  incorruptible  spiritual  substance,  and 
will  become  like  that  of  Christ  in  his  exalted  state  a 
"body  of  glory."  With  this  principle,  which  cannot  be 
removed  from  the  apostle's  theology  without  leaving  it  a 
soulless  body,  it  is  not  easy  to  reconcile  his  doctrine  that 
death  came  into  the  world  in  consequence  of  Adam's 
transgression,  that  "by  one  man's  offence  death  reigned 
by  one"  (Rom.  v.  17),  and  that  "death  passed  upon  all 
because  all  sinned."  Death  is  "the  wages  of  sin,"  and 
the  doctrine  that  it  is  imposed  as  a  divine  judgment  for 
sin  could  not  well  be  more  explicitly  expressed  than  it  is 
in  the  words:  "Therefore  as  by  the  offence  of  one  judg- 
ment came  upon  all  men  to  condemnation,"  etc.  (Rom. 
V.  18),  where  the  "offence"  is  the  sin  on  account  of 
which  "  death  reigned  "  (verse   17). 


THE   DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  245 

We  have,  then,  the  two  propositions  over  against  each 
other,  (i)  that  man  being  "of  flesh"  and  "earthy"  is 
naturally  mortal,  and  (2)  that  his  mortality  is  by  reason 
of  the  divine  judgment  upon  sin.  It  is  true,  as  Sabatier 
remarks,  that  Paul  does  not  say  that  "  the  physical  law  of 
death  did  not  exist  in  the  world  before  the  sin  of  Adam." 
Neither  does  he  say  explicitly  that  Adam  was  by  nature 
immortal,  and  would  not  have  died  if  he  had  not  sinned. 
But  this  proposition  and  its  opposite  are  legitimate  deduc- 
tions from  two  series  of  passages.  The  same  inconsistency 
existed  in  the  later  Jewish  theology,  which  taught  that 
Adam  was  created  mortal,  and  yet  in  consequence  of  the 
fall  became  subject  to  death.*  The  Pauline  antinomy 
cannot  be  solved ;  it  can  only  be  explained,  as  it  has 
been,  by  supposing  that  two  ways  of  regarding  the  sub- 
ject were  in  the  apostle's  mind  without  reconciliation : 
the  Pharisaic-Jewish,  according  to  which  death  was  a  posi- 
tive punishment  of  the  definite  transgression  of  Adam, 
and  that  corresponding  to  the  old  Hebraism  as  well  as 
to  Hellenism,  according  to  which  death  was  the  natural 
consequence  of  the  perishableness  of  all  earthly  material 
(so  Pfleiderer,f  Holtzmann4  Schmiedel,  §   and  others). 

The  passage  concerning  "the  groaning  creation  "  (Rom. 
viii.  19-22)  is  in  accord  with  the  ancient  Hebrew  tradition 
recorded  in  Gen.  iii.  17  as  well  as  with  the  later  Jewish 
theology.  The  latter  taught  that  the  earth  had  its  part 
in  the  curse  of  Adam,  so  that  not  only  human  nature,  but 
also  the  inanimate  creation,  underwent  a  change  in  con- 
sequence of  the  fall.  The  earth  brought  forth  harmful 
insects,  and  the  course  of  the  planets  was  altered  as  a 
result  of  Adam's  sin  ;  their  path  was  lengthened  and  their 
speed  retarded. II     An  echo  of  this  idea  appears  to  be  the 

*  Weber,  6)'j/.fw,  pp.  214,  238.  ^  Pauliiiistfitcs.  XNetitest.  Theol. 

%  Hand-Comineniar.  ||  Weber,  Sy stern,  p.  216. 


246  THE    TEACHER 

teaching  that  "the  whole  creation  groaneth  and  travail- 
eth  in  pain  together  until  now,"  in  ''earnest  expectation  " 
waiting  "for  the  manifestation  of  the  sons  of  God"  —  the 
glorious  revelation  of  their  sonship  which  would  be  effected 
at  the  Parousia,  "the  restoration  of  all  things."  That  this 
condition  of  the  creation  is  not  conceived  as  inhering  in 
its  original  constitution,  but  as  imposed  upon  it  from 
without,  is  evident  from  the  expression,  "on  account  of 
him  who  subjected"  it,  whether  this  one  be  man  effecting 
the  result  through  sin,  or  God  who  did  it  "because  His 
counsel  and  will  had  to  be  thus  satisfied."  The  sin 
which  struck  man  with  mortality  brought  a  maledic- 
tion upon  nature. 

The  objection  to  this  construction  of  the  Pauline  the- 
ology, according  to  which  sin  is  conceived  as  arising  out 
of  the  natural  fleshly  impulse  of  human  nature  in  conjunc- 
tion with  the  divine  law,  that  it  makes  God  the  author  of 
sin,  though  not  "scientific  "  from  the  point  of  view  of  exe- 
gesis, but  dogmatic,  may  well  have  a  brief  consideration, 
because  its  discussion  will  throw  light  upon  the  apostle's 
hamartiology.  If  man  was  originally  of  "  flesh  "  {crapKivo<;), 
"'earthy"  (x^l/co^),  and  "psychical"  (^jrvxl'fc6^),  so  that  sin 
must  immediately  "revive"  when  the  commandment 
comes,  and  if  the  power  of  this  inherent  ajxaprla  was  so 
great  that  its  desolating  sway  has  been  universal,  it  would 
appear  to  be  a  valid  inference  that  sin  is  a  part  of  the 
divine  order  (Rom.  ix.  13,  17,  18,  xi.  7,  8,  32;  Gal.  iii.  21, 
22),  a  necessary  result  of  the  infirmity  of  the  human  con- 
stitution. In  fact,  according  to  the  strenuous  theism  of 
Paul  God  is  the  Author  of  everything  (Rom.  xi.  36 ;  i  Cor. 
viii.  6).  It  is  He  who  created  "the  first  man,"  the  psychi- 
cal, earthly  one  (Rom.  ix.  20-22),  and  He  also  created  the 
last  Adam,  "the  life-giving  spirit,"  who  was  destined  con- 
ditionally to  restore  all  that   the  former   had   devastated. 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  247 

The  apostle  knows  nothing  of  an  absolute  human  freedom. 
On  the  one  hand,  the  psychical  man  is  powerless  under 
the  servitude  to  the  flesh  and  its  indwelling  sinfulness 
(Rom.  vii.  14,  23).  *'The  carnal  mind  is  not  subject  to  the 
law  of  God,  neither  indeed  can  be  "  (Rom.  viii.  7). 

Thus  man  cannot  liberate  and  save  himself ;  but  on  the 
other  hand,  his  salvation  is  effected  by  the  supernatural 
intervention  of  the  mighty  Spirit  of  God  by  whose  power 
his  spiritual  life  is  just  as  certainly  determined  as  his  sinful 
activity  was  governed  by  the  indomitable  ''carnal  mind." 
The  sons  of  God  are  "driven,"  impelled,  determined  in  their 
living  by  the  Spirit  of  God.*  If  the  unregenerate  man  is 
determined  in  his  activity  by  the  compelling  flesh,  the  be- 
liever, who  has  the  Spirit,  acts  under  the  compulsion  of  this 
supernal  power,  this  masterful  over-soul.  ''  Since  the  days 
of  the  prophets  no  one  had  so  strongly  felt  the  constraint  of 
the  divine  thought  upon  man  as  Paul.  If  in  general  man 
regards  the  operations  of  his  being  as  his  free  actions,  be-, 
lieves  that  he  pushes,  and  is  pushed,  is  like  a  stone  which  is 
thrown,  and  thinks  it  flies,  much  more  did  the  apostle  clearly 
feel  the  flight  of  his  spirit  to  be  a  cast  from  the  hand  of 
God."  t  Yet  the  apostle  employs  in  unmistakable  terms 
the  language  of  freedom  and  responsibility.  He  condemns 
men  for  their  transgressions,  and  exhorts  them  to  the 
activities  of  obedience  and  righteousness  quite  as  if  he 
regarded  them  as  free  agents  and  moral  beings  in  the 
libertarian  sense.  If  all  this  denotes  an  antinomy  in  his 
thought,  it  is  one  which  still  lurks  in  our  thinking,  and 
which  theistic  philosophy  has  not  yet  been  able  to  resolve. 

The  dark  picture  of  the  natural  man's  servitude  to  the 
flesh  and  of  his  inability  to  do  right  is  relieved  by  the  doc- 
trine of  the  ecroj  dvOpwiro^,  so  that  Paul   cannot  be  charged 

*  TTpeifiaTi  deov  dyovraL,  Rom.  viii.  14. 

t  Hausrath,  Neiitesiamentliche  Zeitgeschichte^  iii.  p.  113. 


248  THE    TEACHER 

with  teaching  the  traditional  dogma  of  total  depravity. 
The  flesh  is  not  the  whole  man  despite  Holsten's  acute 
reasoning.  There  is  a  delight  in  the  law  of  God  after  the 
inner  man,  and  the  mind  (i^ou?)  renders  a  spontaneous  ser- 
vice to  the  divine  order  of  virtue,  struggling  against  the 
fleshly  impulses  which  reign  in  the  members  (Rom.  vii. 
22  f.).  While  according  to  the  apostle's  philosophy  of  salva- 
tion the  vov^  is  unable  without  the  divine  Trvev/jba  to  attain 
righteousness,  and  appears  to  be  represented  in  Rom. 
vii.  13-23  as  consenting  to  the  law  that  it  is  good  and 
serving  it  so  far  at  least  as  a  recognition  of  its  demands 
and  a  desire  to  fulfil  them  are  concerned,  but  still  doing 
what  it  hates,  there  is  on  the  other  hand  in  passages 
written  without  the  doctrinal  preoccupation  which  often 
leads  him  into  extreme  statements  a  recognition  of  man's 
ability  to  "do  by  nature  the  things  contained  in  the  law," 
even  when  the  subjects  are  gentiles  who  have  only  the  in- 
ward law.  It  would  indeed  be  a  fruitful  inquiry  that  should 
enable  the  expositors  of  Paul  to  determine  to  what  extent 
a  manifest  polemic-dogmatic  interest  on  his  part  in  con- 
nection with  the  antinomies  of  his  thought  should  incline 
them  to  regard  one  or  the  other  member  of  them  as  ex- 
pressing his  deepest  conviction.  There  is,  however,  only 
an  apparent  antinomy  in  his  teaching  on  the  subject  in 
question,  and  the  importance  of  the  right  anthropological 
point  of  view  to  a  comprehension  of  his  doctrine  is  here 
apparent.  The  vov^;  is  a  part  of  man,  and  is  to  be  distin- 
guished from  the  divine  Trvevfia  which  is  elsewhere  repre- 
sented as  striving  against  the  flesh.  The  activity  in  the 
direction  of  the  good  which  he  here  ascribes  to  the  vov^ 
renders  his  teaching  on  the  subject  of  man's  moral  ability 
essentially  different  from  Augustine's. 

The  dreadful  consequences  which   Paul  attaches  to  sin 
indicate  the  deep  earnestness  which  underlay  his  teaching 


THE  DOCTRINE    OF  SIN  249 

regarding  its  nature  and  operations.  As  has  already  been 
pointed  out,  the  judgment  upon  sin  is  conceived  as  an  im- 
mediate decree  of  God,  a  divine  condemnation.  The  hard 
and  impenitent  heart  treasures  up  ''wrath  "  that  will  break 
forth  ''in  the  day  of  wrath/'  i.e.,  at  the  judgment  of  the 
Parousia  which  will  manifest  the  divine  "indignation  and 
wrath,"  and  bring  "tribulation  and  anguish"  upon  evil- 
doers, then  to  be  overwhelmed  by  the  might  of  Him  who 
"taketh  vengeance"  (Rom.  ii.  5,  8,  9,  iii.  5,  v.  9.  See 
also  Eph.  V.  6).  This  terrible  judgment  conceived  and 
executed  by  almighty  power  denotes  the  dread  significance 
of  "death"  {Odvaro^;)  which  is  so  frequently  mentioned  as 
the  penalty  of  sin.  This  means  not  only  the  going  out  of 
existence  of  the  physical  body,  of  soul  (^vxv>  life-principle 
of  the  flesh)  and  body,  but  also  the  exclusion  of  the  indi- 
vidual from  participation  in  the  resurrection,  his  hopeless 
tarrying  in  the  underworld,  hades,  the  realm  of  the  dead, 
if  not  the  absolute  destruction  of  his  personality.  The 
words  "  corruption  "  (<pdopd),  "  destruction  "  (aTrcoXeia)  and 
their  corresponding  verbs  {(^OeipeaOai  and  cLTroWvaOai)  do 
not  mean  simply  punishment  and  to  punish,  and  do  not 
convey  the  mere  idea  of  temporal  overthrow,  but  their 
proper  sense  is  exclusion  from  existence  as  ordinarily  un- 
derstood and  in  particular  from  the  life  of  believers  who 
alone,  since  they  had  "the  Spirit,"  could  hope  for  resurrec- 
tion. It  is  not  of  great  moment  whether  the  terms  signify 
the  absolute  extinction  of  being  or  simply  exclusion  from 
the  resurrection,  for  according  to  the  ideas  of  the  time  the 
sad  and  gloomy  existence  of  shades  in  the  underworld  was 
scarcely  to  be  preferred  to  annihilation.  The  Jewish  the- 
ology believed  in  the  destruction  of  the  wicked  in  gehenna 
with  discrimination  against  some.*  For  Paul's  use  of  the 
words  see  in  particular  Rom.  ix.  22;   i   Cor.  iii.    17,     Such 

*  Weber,  Sysiem,  pp.  374,  375. 


2  50  THE    TEACHER 

being  the  apostle's  view  of  the  fate  of  the  wicked,  it  is 
evident  that  the  doctrine  of  their  endless  punishment  has 
no  support  in  his  writings,  but  that  his  thought  on  the 
matter  is  rather  expressed  by  the  aK^vihio^  6\e6po^  (swift 
destruction)  of  i  Thess.  v.  3. 

The  Pauline  doctrine  of  sin  considered  by  itself  presents 
a  gloomy  view  of  human  nature,  life,  and  destiny  —  the 
indomitable  flesh  with  its  debasing  appetites  and  passions  ; 
the  law  in  the  members  in  endless  warfare  against  the  law 
of  the  mind  ;  the  inward  man  which  delights  in  the  law  of 
God  engaged  in  a  doubtful  struggle  with  the  powers  of 
evil ;  and  the  universal  reign  of  death  in  whose  awful  har- 
vest the  wicked  are  gathered  to  destruction.  A  full  view 
of  the  apostle's  thought  requires  a  consideration  of  his  doc- 
trine of  redemption,  from  which  a  gleam  of  hope  is  thrown 
upon  this  darkness,  and  in  which  the  despairing  exclama- 
tion "  O  wretched  man  that  I  am  ! "  is  answered  by  the 
cry  of  triumph,  "  Thanks  be  to  God  who  giveth  us  the 
victory  through  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ." 


CHAPTER    XI 

SALVATION  —  ATONEMENT 

TO  Paul  salvation  was  inseparably  connected  with  par- 
ticipation in  the  approaching  kingdom  of  God  which 
Christ  at  his  second  coming  (Paronsia)  was  to  establish. 
In  this  respect  his  conception  of  soteriology  is  in  accord 
with  that  of  the  other  New  Testament  writers  (Matt.  xxv. 
31-46;  Mark  xiii.  24-37;  i  Tim.  vi.  14;  2  Tim.  iv.  i,  8; 
2  Pet.  iii.  10-14).  He  reminds  the  Thessalonians  that 
they  had  turned  "from  idols  to  serve  the  living  and  true 
God,"  not  as  an  end  sufficient  in  itself,  but  with  a  view  to 
an  ulterior  though  not  remote  consummation,  viz.:  *'to 
wait  for  His  Son  from  heaven,  whom  He  raised  from  the 
dead,  even  Jesus,  who  delivers  us  from  the  wrath  to  come  " 
(i  Thess.  i.  10).  This  deliverance  from  the  ''wrath" 
which  would  be  manifested  against  unbelievers  in  the  great 
day  of  Christ's  Parousia  constitutes  the  nerve  of  salvation 
from  the  Pauline  and  the  general  New  Testament  point  of 
view.  This  was  the  inheritance  of  the  New  Testament 
writers  from  Judaism,  to  which  *' the  age  to  come,"  the 
Messianic  age,  held  all  the  blessedness  and  glory  that  God 
purposed  to  bestow  upon  His  people.  Accordingly,  to 
Paul  he  that  is  to  be  ''saved  "  will  be  "  saved  in  the  day  of 
the  Lord  Jesus"  (i  Cor.  v.  5).  The  Romans  are  admon- 
ished to  exercise  brotherly  love  and  keep  the  command- 
ments as  "knowing  the  time,  that  it  is  now  high  time  to 
awake  out  of  sleep ;  for  now  is  our  salvation  nearer  than 
when  we  believed,"  that   is,   became   believers.      "  Salva- 

251 


252  THE    TEACHER 

tion  "  is  not  thought  to  be  consummated  in  the  practice  of 
the  moral  virtues  or  the  keeping  of  the  commandment  in 
which  all  the  others  are  '' comprehended,"  but  is  to  be 
realised  in  the  near  future,  the  Messianic  ''age  to  come"  ; 
and  because  the  great  ''day  is  at  hand,"  the  apostle  says, 
'Met  us  therefore  cast  off  the  works  of  darkness,  and  let  us 
put  on  the  armour  of  light"  (Rom.  xiii.  8-13).  From  this 
point  of  view  the  "promise,"  the  "inheritance,"  and  the 
glory  of  the  approaching  kingdom  appear  not  only  as  a 
hope  and  encouragement,  but  also  as  a  motive. 

As  Christ  was  to  come  to  usher  in  and  establish  the 
kino:dom,  as  he  then  would  claim  his  own  to  reiiin  with 
him,  so  he  is  conceived  as  the  sole  and  indispensable 
agency  of  salvation.  The  glorious  deliverance  which  will 
be  effected  at  the  coming  of  the  kingdom  depends  uncon- 
ditionally upon  his  previous  relation  to  those  who  are  to 
enjoy  it.  Their  title  to  the  inheritance  comes  only 
"through"  him.  The  kingdom  is  one  of  righteousness, 
and  he  must  be  righteous  who  becomes  a  member  of  it 
and  a  participant  in  its  blessedness.  This  was  not  an 
original  Christian  idea,  but  was  derived  from  the  Messi- 
anic doctrine  of  Judaism.  Paul  made  it  his  own,  however, 
and  he  declares  that  "the  kingdom  of  God  is  righteous- 
ness and  peace  and  joy  in  the  Holy  Ghost."  Now  the 
Pauline  doctrine  of  salvation  takes  its  departure  from  two 
propositions  which  to  its  author  were  indisputable,  namely, 
that  no  man  is  by  nature  righteous  and  therefore  fitted  for 
the  kingdom,  and  that  no  one  can  of  himself  obtain  right- 
eousness. On  the  one  hand,  "Jews  and  gentiles  are  all 
under  sin"  (Rom.  iii.  9),  and  on  the  other,  "by  the  deeds 
of  the  law  there  shall  no  flesh  be  justified  "  (verse  20),  that 
is,  the  righteousness  which  is  requisite  for  admission  to 
the  kingdom  is  unattainable  by  the  utmost  endeavour  to 
observe  the  requirements  of  the  law  as  they  are  laid  down 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  TONEMENT  253 

in  the  Old  Testament.  The  only  righteousness  that  can 
avail  is  that  which  is  '*  of  God,"  that  is,  bestowed  by  God, 
and  the  condition  of  attaining  this  is  "faith  in  Jesus 
Christ."  All  may  be  justified  freely  by  the  grace  of  God 
through  the  redemption  that  is  in  Christ  (verses  22,  24). 
The  sum  of  the  whole  matter  is  expressed  in  the  words  : 
**  Therefore  we  conclude  that  a  man  is  justified  by  faith 
without  the  deeds  of  the  law"  (verse  28). 

It  is  evident,  then,  that  since  *'all  have  sinned,  and  come 
short  of  the  glory  of  God,"  the  relation  between  God  and 
man  is  abnormal  and  discordant,  and  that  the  entire  fortune 
of  the  kingdom  of  God,  or  in  other  words,  the  destiny  of  the 
human  race,  depends  upon  the  establishment  of  right  rela- 
tions between  them,  that  is,  upon  the  extent  to  which  the 
mission  of  Christ  should  realise  its  purpose.  A  reconcilia- 
tion must  be  effected,  an  atonement  made,  before  man,  the 
**  servant  of  sin,"  who  cannot  alone  free  himself  from  his 
bondage,  can  become  a  subject  of  the  kingdom  of  God. 
Paul  does  not  appear  ever  to  have  raised  the  question  why 
God  chose  this  means  of  saving  man,  that  is,  the  intervention 
of  Christ,  or  whether  He  might  not  have  accomplished  the 
same  result  in  another  way,  by  a  general  and  uncondi- 
tional pardon,  for  example.  It  was  enough  for  him  that 
according  to  the  "revelation"  that  he  had  had  this  was 
God's  plan.  When  it  pleased  God  to  reveal  His  Son  in 
him  (Gal.  i.  15,  16),  the  Christ  that  he  saw  was  the  resur- 
rected and  glorified  Christ,  and  in  the  resurrection  he  rec- 
ognised God's  seal  confirming  the  Son  as  the  Saviour  of 
the  world  and  transforming  the  opprobrious  cross  into  a 
symbol  of  redemption.  Accordingly,  Menegoz  has  admi- 
rably remarked  that  "  Paul's  faith  in  the  expiatory  sacrifice 
of  Christ  was  not  the  conclusion  of  a  process  of  reasoning 
on  the  relation  between  the  mercy  and  justice  of  God, 
but  on  the  contrary,  the  apostle's  ideas  on  the  justice  and 


2  54  THE    TEACHER 

mercy  of  God  were  founded  on  bis  faith  in  the  expiatory 
death  of  Christ." 

The  entire  PauHne  scheme  of  salvation  through  Christ 
hinges  upon  his  death,  and  no  greater  violence  can  be  done 
to  this  teaching  than  to  interpret  it  in  the  sense  that  the 
office  of  Jesus  was  simply  a  reconciliation  of  man  to  God 
through  the  moral  influence  of  his  life.  From  this  point 
of  view  the  death  on  the  cross  has  no  other  significance 
than  that,  as  an  inevitable  consequence  of  Jesus'  devotion 
to  duty,  it  may  serve  as  an  example  and  an  ethical  impulse 
to  men  in  the  interest  of  a  similar  consecration.  This 
interpretation,  which  springs  from  a  rationalistic  motive  or 
a  motive  to  make  the  apostle's  teaching  correspond  with 
•what  seems  rational  to  the  expositor,  is  without  exegetical 
support.  The  attempt  to  maintain  it  is  made  in  total 
disregard  of  the  most  explicit  declarations  of  the  apostle, 
in  which  the  entire  stress  in  defining  the  work  of  Christ  is 
laid  upon  his  death,  or  these  declarations  are  not  accorded 
their  legitimate  force  and  meaning.  The  central  sig- 
nificance of  the  death  of  Christ  appears  unmistakably  in 
such  passages  as  the  following:  "When  we  were  yet 
without  strength,  in  due  time  Christ  died  for  the  un- 
godly "  ;  ''  While  we  were  yet  sinners,  Christ  died  for  us  " ; 
''  We  were  reconciled  to  God  by  the  death  of  His  Son  "  ; 
*'  Being  now  justified  by  his  blood,  we  shall  be  saved  from 
wrath  through  him  "  (Rom.  v.  6-10);  ''For  in  that  he 
died,  he  died  unto  sin  once  "  ;  "  If  we  have  been  planted 
together  in  the  likeness  of  his  death"  (Rom.  vi.  5,  10); 
''Who  was  delivered  for  our  offences,  and  was  raised  again 
for  our  justification  "  (Rom.  iv.  25);  "Whom  God  set  forth 
to  be  a  propitiation  through  faith  in  his  blood"  (Rom.  iii. 
25);  "  If  righteousness  come  by  the  law,  then  Christ  is  dead 
in  vain  "(Gal.  ii.  21) ;  "Who  died  for  us,  that  whether  we 
wake   or   sleep   [are   living  or   dead  at    the  time  of   the 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  TONE  ME  NT  255 

Parousia  — cf.  i  Thess.  iv.  13-17]  we  should  live  together 
with  him  "  (i  Thess.  v.  10) ;  ''  For  the  preachiiig  of  the  cross 
is  to  them  that  perish  foolishness  ;  but  unto  us  who  are 
saved  it  is  the  power  of  God"  ;  "We  preach  Christ  cruci- 
fied" ;    "I  determined  not  to  know  anything  among  you 
save  Jesus  Christ  and  him  crucified  "  (i  Cor.  i.  18,  23,  ii.  2). 
These  passages  show  unmistakably  that  to  the  apostle 
the  death  of  Christ  was  vital  and  essential  in  his  redemptive 
work.     There  is  besides   no  evidence  that   he  attached   a 
fundamental  importance  to  the  moral  qualities  of  the  life  of 
Jesus  or  to  his  example.     In  Rom.  v.  10,  ''  For  if  when  we 
were  enemies  we  were  reconciled  to  God  by  the  death  of 
his  Son,  much  more  being  reconciled,  we  shall  be  saved 
by  his  life,"  means  that,  just  as  the  believer's  justification 
and    reconciliation    have    been    effected    by  the    death    of 
Christ,  so  his   future   salvation,  his   deliverance   from   the 
wrath    of    God    and   his    participation    in    the    glory    and 
blessedness  of  the  coming  kingdom,  will  be  brought  about 
through  the  resurrection  of  Jesus.     The  fact  that  Jesus 
now  lives,  and  will  come  again  gives  him  assurance  of  the 
consummation    of    his    salvation.      The    ''obedience"    of 
Christ  which  is  set  over  against  the  disobedience  of  Adam, 
and    represented    as    the    means    of    counteracting   it    by 
making  many  righteous  (Rom.  v.  19)  does  not  relate  to  his 
ethical  conduct  or  to  the  influence  of  his  example,  but  to 
his  subjection  of  himself  to  the  death  of  the  cross,  which 
though  voluntary  on  his  part  was  yet  in  accordance  with 
the  will  of  God  :  ''Who  gave  himself  for  our  sins,  that  he 
might  deliver  us  from   this  present   evil  world    [age,  the 
'evil'    time    preceding    the    Parousia    and    'the    age    to 
come']  according  to  the  will  of  God"  (Gal.  i.  4).     Accord- 
ingly, the  apostle  says  of  Christ  that  he  humbled  himself, 
and  became  obedient  unto  death,  even   the  death   of  the 
cross  (Phil.  ii.  8).     It  is  significant,  moreover,  that  when  he 


256  THE    TEACHER 

enforces  upon  the  believers  the  practice  of  brotherly  love, 
he  does  not  adduce  the  life  of  Jesus  as  an  example,  but 
cites  only  the  fact  of  his  death  ''for  all"  as  a  reason  why 
*'they  who  live  should  not  henceforth  live  to  themselves, 
but  to  him  who  died  for  them,  and  rose  again."  No  one 
familiar  with  the  self-sacrificing"  life  of  Jesus  and  holding 
it  in  high  regard  as  an  example  could  instead  of  using 
illustrations  drawn  from  it  resort  to  an  Old  Testament 
quotation  as  he  does  in  Rom.  xv.  2,  3  :  ''  Let  every  one  of 
us  please  his  neighbour  for  his  good  to  edification  ;  for  even 
Christ  pleased  not  himself,  but  as  it  is  written,  the  re- 
proaches of  them  that  reproached  thee  fell  upon  me."  * 

The  object  of  the  death  of  Christ,  as  Paul  conceived  it, 
was  to  counteract  the  effects  of  Adam's  sin  and  thus 
restore  the  normal  relations  between  God  and  man. 
This  thought  is  clearly  defined  in  the  words:  ''Therefore 
as  by  the  offence  of  one  judgment  came  upon  all  men  to 
condemnation,  even  so  by  the  righteousness  of  one  the 
free  gift  came  upon  all  men  unto  justification  of  life" 
(Rom.  V.  18).  This  act  of  righteousness  which  in  the 
following  verse  is  called  "obedience,"  that  is,  compliance 
with  the  will  of  God  on  the  cross,  was  an  atonement  for  all 
men  objectively  considered  and  subjectively  for  as  many 

*  In  Rom.  viii.  3,  God's  sending  of  His  Son  "  in  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh," 
and  thereby  condemning  sin  in  the  flesh,  is  interpreted  by  Dr.  Stevens  (  7'he 
Pauline  Theology,  p.  231)  as  "certainly"  implying  "that  the  overthrow  of  the 
dominion  of  sin  in  the  flesh  was  conditional  upon  the  sinlessness  of  the  life  of 
Jesus."  But  "in  the  flesh"  should  be  connected  with  "condemned."  The 
condemnation  of  sin  was  in  the  flesh  of  Christ  on  the  cross.  In  his  death  was 
executed  the  judgment  of  condemnation  upon  it,  and  the  benefit  of  this  repre- 
sentative suffering  of  the  death  entailed  in  the  divine  order  upon  sin  accrues  to 
men  in  so  far  as  through  faith  they  come  into  that  mystic  fellowship  with  the 
death  of  Christ,  whereby  they  ideally  die  to  that  to  which  he  died.  Thus,  and 
thus  only,  "  the  righteousness  of  the  law  may  be  fulfilled  "  in  them,  since  by 
reason  of  his  atonement  and  their  appropriation  of  it  they  are  no  more  "  after 
the  flesh,  but  after  the  spirit"  (verse  4). 


SA L  I  ^A  riON—  A  TONEMENT  257 

as  through  faith  lay  hold  on  the  salvation  thus  offered, 
and  so  become  subjects  of  the  divine  decree  of  ''justifica- 
tion" which  assures  them  "life,"  yet,  not  merely  the 
moral-religious  quality  of  life  in  the  present  existence,  but 
superiority  to  death,  the  resurrection,  and  participation  in 
the  blessedness  of  the  kingdom  at  the  Parousia.  The 
necessity  of  an  atonement  was  conceived  to  be  based  upon 
the  relation  of  hostility  between  man  and  God,  the  removal 
of  which  could  alone  save  the  race  from  ''destruction." 
Unless  a  new  principle  of  "life"  were  introduced,  the 
"death"  which  had  come  into  the  world  through  Adam's 
sin  would  continue  unmitigatedly  its  dreadful  work,  until 
all  would  "  perish,"  as  some  were  destined  to  be  destroyed 
in  "the  day  of  the  Lord"  (i  Thess.  v.  2,  3).  The  relation 
of  hostility  is  expressed  in  various  terms.  In  Rom.  v.  10, 
the  apostle  says  :  "  For  when  we  were  enemies,  we  were 
reconciled  to  God  by  the  death  of  His  Son"  ;  and  again  : 
"The  carnal  mind  is  enmity  against  God,  for  it  is  not 
subject  to  the  law  of  God,  neither  indeed  can  be"  (Rom. 
viii.  7).  The  condition  of  the  natural  man,  the  man  who 
is  not  "in  the  Spirit,"  is  one  in  which  it  is  impossible  to 
"please  God"  (Rom.  viii.  8,  9). 

The  hostility  in  question  is  of  the  nature  of  an  active 
opposition  expressing  itself  in  disobedience  and  in  a  course 
of  life  which  cannot  meet  with  the  divine  approval.  An 
enmity  of  man  from  the  divine  point  of  view,  as  passive 
enmity,  certainly  belongs  to  this  general  conception  of  hos- 
tility, and  if  it  is  not  implied  in  the  passages  in  hand,  is 
unequivocally  expressed  in  Rom.  xi.  28,  where  "enemies" 
of  God  are  contrasted  with  those  who  are  "  beloved  "  of 
Him.  The  hostility  of  God  to  the  natural  man,  who  is 
controlled  by  the  carnal  mind,  is  expressed  by  the  term 
"wrath."  Because  the  law  induces  transgression,  the 
apostle   says   that   it   "  worketh   wrath."     "The  wrath   of 


258  THE    TEACHER 

God  is  revealed  from  heaven  against  all  ungodliness  and 
unrighteousness  of  men."  The  evil-doer  ''treasures  up- 
wrath  against  the  day  of  wrath  and  revelation  of  the  right- 
eous judgment  of  God  "  (Rom.  i.  18,  ii.  5,  iv.  15  ;  cf.  i  Thess. 
i.  10,  ii.  16).  There  is  an  apparent  incongruity  in  the  fact 
that  in  Rom.  xi.  28  the  Jews  are  represented  as  at  the  same 
time  objects  of  God's  hostility  and  of  His  love.  The  same 
must  be  said  of  the  conception  of  God's  wrath  toward  sin- 
ners in  general,  which  to  the  apostle  is  not  incompatible 
with  His  love  for  them  that  is  preeminently  manifested  in 
the  mission  of  Christ,  for  ''God  commendeth  His  love 
toward  us  in  that  while  we  were  yet  sinners,  Christ  died 
for  us  "  (Rom.  v.  8).  This  dual  state  of  feeling  is  not, 
however,  foreign  to  our  experience,  and  the  apostle's  rep- 
resentation of  the  matter  doubtless  belongs  to  the  general 
anthropopathic  conception  of  the  age.  It  must  not  be 
forgotten  that  he  thought  of  God's  relation  to  man  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  judicial  idea  of  Judaism,  to  which  the 
law  was  inexorable.*  It  was  an  expression  of  God's  attitude 
toward  sin,  and  must  take  its  inevitable  course  of  retri- 
bution unless  an  atonement  was  provided.  The  thought 
never  appears  to  have  occurred  to  Paul  that  God  could 
arrest  the  penal  operation  of  the  law  on  any  other  condi- 
tion, but  must  allow  it  to  proceed  in  its  remorseless  inflic- 
tion of  death  and  destruction. 

But  though  God  is  conceived  as  unable  to  arrest  the 
fatal  course  of  the  law,  though  His  "  wrath  "  must  have 

*  The  "  Jewish  basis  "  must  not  be  disregarded.  "  Ancient  thought  in  gen- 
eral, but  in  particular  the  religious  consciousness  of  the  later  Judaism,  regu- 
lated the  relations  between  the  Deity,  who  represented  the  moral  requirements 
and  avenged  the  transgression  of  them,  and  men,  from  the  axiom  that  on  the 
one  hand  compensation  must  be  made  to  requiting  justice  for  guilt  incurred, 
a  sacrifice  must  fall,  but  on  the  other,  an  innocent  person  may  intervene  for  the 
atonement  of  the  offence,  and  thus  take  the  penalty  upon  himself." — Holtz- 
mann,  A^eutest.  Theol.  ii.  p.  109. 


SAL  VA  riON—  A  TONEMENT  259 

its  work  upon  the  transgressor  under  the  natural  order, 
His  love  for  man  is  manifested  in  the  fact  that  He  origi- 
nates the  scheme  by  which  man  may  be  delivered  from  the 
impending  "destruction."  He  ''sends  His  Son,"  and  the 
Son,  whose  glorious  estate  was  such  that  he  is  represented 
as  being  "in  the  form  of  God,"  "made  himself  of  no  repu- 
tation, and  took  upon  himself  the  form  of  a  servant,  and 
was  made  in  the  likeness  of  men,"  that  through  obedience 
unto  death  on  the  cross  he  might  effect  the  great  redemp- 
tion (Rom.  V.  8  ;  Phil.  ii.  7,  8).  It  is  unwarrantable,  then, 
so  to  rationalise  the  Pauline  doctrine  of  the  atonement  that 
it  shall  appear  that  of  the  two  parties  in  the  hostile  rela- 
tion one  only,  man,  was  "  reconciled  "  through  a  change  of 
disposition  or  the  abandonment  of  his  enmity.  The  atone- 
ment proceeds  from  God,  and  is  a  transaction  conceived 
in  heaven  without  man's  participation.  Christ  does  not 
come  to  effect  by  his  teaching  and  example  such  a  change 
in  the  moral  disposition  of  men  that  they  shall  be  recon- 
ciled to  the  divine  order.  This  is  a  secondary  result.  Pri- 
marily the  law  must  be  satisfied.  Then  those  men  who 
accept  through  faith  this  atonement  are  "freely  justified 
by  His  grace  "  ;  but  only  "  through  tJie  redemption  that  is  in 
Jesus  Christ "  (Rom.  iii.  24).  Far  from  proceeding  from  men, 
the  atonement  comes  to  them  through  the  office  of  Jesus, 
"by  whom  we  have  now  received  the  atonement  "  (Rom.  v. 
11).  "God  was  in  Christ  reconciling  the  world  unto  Him- 
self "  (2  Cor.  V.  19).  Not  only  is  the  initiative  on  His  part, 
but  the  process  is  defined  as  His  in  that  He  does  "not 
impute  their  trespasses  unto  men."  Accordingly,  if,  when 
in  the  following  verse  Paul  prays  the  Corinthians  to  "  be 
reconciled  to  God,"  their  change  of  disposition  completed 
the  transaction,  then  it  were  idle  to  speak  of  God's  part  in 
not  imputing  their  trespasses.   . 

According  to  the  Pauline  doctrine,  men's  trespasses  are 


26o  THE    TEACHER 

no  longer  reckoned  as  theirs  when  they  have  accepted 
Christ  by  faith,  because  he  has  made  the  atoning  sacri- 
fice which  satisfies  the  demands  of  justice,  and  does  away 
with  the  law,  so  far  as  it  can  have  any  claims  upon  them 
after  they  have  fulfilled  the  conditions.  The  penal  opera- 
tion of  the  law  ceases  for  them,  and  since  this  is  the  ex- 
pression of  the  divine  "  wrath,"  it  may  be  said  that  God 
has  for  them  laid  aside  His  wrath.  Accordingly,  the  atone- 
ment as  the  apostle  understood  it  implies  a  change  of 
attitude  on  God's  part ;  and,  indeed,  this  may  be  regarded 
as  the  most  important  factor  in  the  transaction.  He  con- 
ceives and  institutes  the  atonement.  He  provides  for  the 
satisfaction  of  the  law,  and  offers  this  means  of  reconcilia- 
tion to  men.  They  have  only  to  accept  it  through  faith 
and  enter  into  the  mystic  fellowship  with  Christ  by  being 
''baptized  into  his  death"  (Rom.  vi.  3,  4).  Then  they  will 
receive  "the  Spirit"  and  the  "adoption  as  sons,"  will 
henceforth  be  under  "the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life  in  Jesus 
Christ,"  and  may  look  forward  with  joy  to  the  resurrection 
and  the  blessedness  of  the  approaching  kingdom.  If  the 
idea  of  a  change  of  disposition  and  attitude  in  God  is  repul- 
sive to  our  theistic  philosophy,  this  is  no  good  reason  why 
we  should  maintain  that  it  does  not  belong  to  Paul's  theol- 
ogy, which  must  be  ascertained  by  exegesis  and  not  by  a 
priori  reasoning.  The  result  of  exegesis  is  that  he  believed 
that  God's  "wrath"  was  directed  against  the  sinner,  and 
that  it  would  pursue  him  to  "destruction,"  unless  an  aton- 
ing satisfaction  intervened.  If  he  thought  there  was  any 
other  way  in  which  the  constant  grace  and  love  of  God 
could  come  to  the  relief  of  man  in  the  bondage  to  sin,  he 
does  not  give  any  intimation  of  such  an  idea. 

How  according:  to  Paul  Christ  effected  the  salvation  of 
men  is  explicitly  expressed  in  the  words  :  "  Christ  hath 
redeemed  us  from  the  curse  of  the  la\v,  having  been  made 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  TONEMENT  26 1 

a  curse  for  us  ;  as  it  is  written,  cursed  is  every  one  that 
hangeth  on  a  tree"  (Gal.  iii.  13).  Here  is  evident  the 
emphasis  heretofore  pointed  out  which  he  places  upon  the 
death  of  Christ.  It  is  by  means  of  the  death  on  the  cross 
that  man's  redemption  is  effected.  The  idea  here  is  plainly 
that  of  vicarious  expiation.  By  his  death  on  the  cross 
Christ  paid  the  price  of  the  deliverance  of  men  from  bond- 
age to  the  law,  whose  curse  rests  upon  all  that  are  subject 
to  it,  since  being  unable  to  fulfil  its  requirements  they 
must  bear  its  penalty  of  destruction.  *' Redeemed"  (e^riyo- 
paaev)  means  '' bought  off,"  and  the  thought  is  that  as 
the  representative  head  of  the  race  Christ  by  his  death  in 
which  he  became  a  curse  for  us  purchased  our  ransom. 
The  law,  conceived  as  a  power  which  even  God  cannot  dis- 
regard, demands  the  penalty  of  sin,  and  Christ  is  doubtless 
here  conceived  as  paying  for  the  human  race  that  penalty 
to  the  law,  for  the  apostle  cannot  have  thought  of  him  as 
buying  off  mankind  from  God  or  from  the  devil.  The 
citation  from  Deut.  xxi.  23  relates  to  the  requirement  that 
the  body  of  one  hanged  for  a  crime  worthy  of  death  should 
not  be  left  over  night  upon  the  tree,  lest  the  land  be 
defiled,  "for  he  that  is  hanged  is  accursed  of  God."  Paul 
regards  Christ  in  suffering  this  accursed  death  as  bearing 
the  curse  of  the  law  in  his  capacity  as  the  redeeming 
Messiah,  instead  of  being  a  rejected  and  abandoned  out- 
cast who  by  the  fact  of  his  crucifixion  was  branded  with  a 
curse,  as  he  must  have  thought  of  him  before  his  conver- 
sion. Lipsius'  opinion  that  these  words  from  Deuteronomy 
were  of  fundamental  importance  for  Paul's  whole  theology 
is  hardly  well  taken,  although  he  concedes  that  this  point  of 
view  does  not  appear  in  Romans,  and  Dr.  Everett  has  made 
too  much  of  a  passing  allusion  to  the  curse  that  in  Israel 
attached  to  a  particular  mode  of  executing  criminals.* 

*  The  Gospel  of  Paid. 


262  THE    TEACHER 

The  fact  "of  fundamental  importance"  for  Paul  was  that 
Christ  suffered  death,  the  penalty  of  the  law,  and  thus 
satisfied  its  demands  "once"  as  the  head  of  mankind,  so 
that  all  might  be  redeemed  from  its  curse.  The  cross  is 
made  prominent  in  his  teaching  generally  not  because  under 
the  Old  Testament  order  a  curse  attached  to  hanging,  but 
because  it  happened  to  be  the  instrument  of  Christ's  death.* 
The  passage  in  question  must  be  interpreted  in  connection 
with  verse  lo:  "For  as  many  as  are  of  the  works  of  the 
law  are  under  the  curse  of  the  law,"  that  is,  he  who  under- 
takes to  attain  salvation  by  keeping  the  law  is  under  its 
curse,  and  will  "perish."  But  Christ  (verse  13)  redeemed 
men  from  this  curse,  by  taking  upon  himself  the  penalty 
of  the  law,  death,  and  thus  becoming  a  curse  for  them. 
The  law  being  thus  satisfied  was  abolished,  Christ  became 
through  his  atonement  "the  end  of  the  law,"  and  the  new 
dispensation  of  "the  Spirit"  and  "life"  was  introduced. 
This  interpretation  is  supported  by  other  passages  which 
represent  the  Christians  as  redeemed  in  the  sense  that  a 
"price"  has  been  paid  for  them:  "Ye  are  bought  with  a 
price"  (i  Cor.  vi.  20,  vii.  23).  Similarly  Christ  is  said  to 
have  been  "made  of  God  unto  us  wisdom  and  righteous- 
ness and  redemption"  (i  Cor.  i.  30).  Here  "redemption" 
is  used  in  the  sense  of  the  payment  of  a  ransom  (Ex.  xxi. 
8).  Paul  does  not  use  the  word  in  the  weaker  sense  of 
"  setting  free  from  "  except  once,  and  then  in  connection 
with  the  body  (Rom.  viii.  23).  The  words  in  Col.  i.  14 : 
"  In  whom  we  have  redemption  through  his  blood"  express 
the  Pauline  idea.  The  blood  of  Christ  is  the  ransom 
(Xvrpov)  which  releases  man  from  the  curse  of  the  law. 
Pfleiderer   has   appropriately    pointed    out    the  futility  of 

*  One  would  hardly  attempt  to  maintain  that  Paul's  doctrine  of  the  atone- 
ment would  have  been  different  if  Jesus  had  been  put  to  death  through  any 
other  instrumentality  than  the  cross. 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  TONEMENT  263 

raising  such  questions  as,  "  To  whom  was  the  price  of 
redemption  paid?"  "Why  was  there  need -of  paying  a 
price?"  ''Can  Christ's  death  be  regarded  as  a  satisfactory 
price  or  equivalent  for  man's  redemption  ?  "  *'  Paul  himself 
doubtless  never  found  any  occasion  for  raising  such  dog- 
matic questions,  because  he  did  not  proceed  from  a  priori 
dogmatic  reflections  on  the  necessity  or  possibility  of  a 
saving  atonement,  but  from  given  facts  and  theories,  which 
he  simply  related  to  one  another,  interpreting  the  one  in 
the  light  of  the  other." 

It  should  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  apostle's  doctrine 
of  atonement  is  due  to  the  circumstance  that  instead  of 
being  a  rationalising  Christian  philosopher  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  he  had  been  educated  in  the  school  of 
ancient  thought  and  particularly  in  the  Jewish  theology, 
where  any  one  may  learn  what  he  had  learned  that  ''the 
suffering  and  death  of  the  righteous  have  an  atoning 
power  to  make  satisfaction  for  their  own  sins  and  for 
those  of  the  whole  people."  Believing  that  Christ  had 
died  for  men,  he  could  not  but  interpret  his  death  as  he 
had  been  accustomed  to  regard  atonement  in  general. 
That  the  law  or  the  righteousness  of  God  of  which  it  is  an 
expression  must  be  satisfied,  and  that  man  could  render 
a  satisfaction  only  by  his  death  in  the  sense  of  "everlasting 
destruction,"  were  the  two  premises  from  which  he  set  out. 
The  conclusion  was  inevitable  that  man  could  be  "saved" 
from  "perishing"  only  by  a  representative  satisfaction 
rendered  by  "the  second  Adam,"  "the  man  from  heaven." 

A  prominent  feature  of  the  atonement  as  held  by 
Paul  is  doubtless  that  of  sacrifice,  "  construed,"  as  Holtz- 
mann  concludes,  "from  the  premises  of  expiation  and 
recompense."  He  finds  here  the  influence  of  the  later 
Jewish  ideas  of  "exchange,"  "substitution,"  and  "satis- 
faction."   The  reaction  of  the  sacrificial  death  of  Christ  is 


264  THE    TEACHER 

expressed  in  the  non-imputation  of ^  their  sins  to  those  for 
whose  benefit  the  satisfaction  of  the  law  was  effected 
through  the  sacrifice  (2  Cor.  v.  19).  Such  is  probably  the 
doctrine  of  Rom.  viii.  3  :  "  For  what  the  law  could  not  do 
in  that  it  was  weak  through  the  flesh,  God  sending  His 
own  Son  in  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh  and  for  sin  con- 
demned sin  in  the  flesh."  The  end  in  view  is  the  deliver- 
ance from  the  power  of  sin  and  death  and  the  fulfilment  in 
the  believers  of  the  righteousness  of  the  law  (verses  2,  4) 
through  the  atoning  effect  of  Christ's  death.  This  the  law 
could  not  do  on  account  of  the  power  of  *'the  flesh."  It 
could  enjoin,  and  declare  the  penalty  of  sin,  but  had  not 
the  strength  to  break  its  power.  Man  could  not  attain 
righteousness  under  it,  could  not  free  himself  from  its 
''  bondage,"  because  by  reason  of  his  inability  to  fulfil  it 
the  account  was  constantly  running  up  against  him.  His 
deliverance  came  through  Christ  "  in  the  likeness  of  sinful 
flesh."  Without  the  flesh  he  could  not  accomplish  man's 
deliverance.  His  appearance,  if  that  were  possible,  in  the 
"glory"  of  his  heavenly  state  as  a  teacher  of  spiritual 
truth,  the  exercise  of  moral  influence  to  quicken  the  facul- 
ties of  men,  would  not  meet  the  conditions  of  the  problem 
as  it  presented  itself  to  Paul.  The  penalty  of  sin  must 
first  be  paid  before  "the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life"  could 
become  operative.  Death  is  that  penalty,  and  it  must  be 
paid,  and  can  only  be  paid  in  the  flesh.  To  save  man  from 
death  with  its  attendant  "everlasting  destruction,"  a  sub- 
stitute, a  representative  of  the  race,  must  die  "in  the 
flesh."  Hence  we  must  interpret  "the  likeness  of  sinful 
flesh "  not  in  the  sense  that  Jesus  had  a  flesh  merely 
similar  to  that  of  man  yet  without  the  natural  impulses 
which  belong  to  the  flesh  in  the  Pauline  sense  of  the  word. 
If  he  was  "without  sin,"  it  does  not  follow  that  he  was  with- 
out sinful  impulses,  which  indeed  are  implied  in  the  synoptic 


SA  L  VA  riON—  A  TONEMENT  265 

story  of  the  temptation  and  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews. 
Paul,  it  is  true,  nowhere  represents  him  as  undergoing  a 
struggle  with  temptation,  neither  does  he  imply  that  he 
was  conceived  and  born  otherwise  than  after  the  natural 
manner.  ''  Born  of  the  seed  of  David  according  to  the 
flesh"  is  his  formula  (Rom.  i.  3).  *'He  was  made  to  be 
sin  for  us"  (2  Cor.  v.  21)  in  the  fact  that  he  suffered  the 
penalty  of  sin,  yet  he  was  not  made,  and  did  not  become, 
according  to  Paul's  thought,  a  sinner. 

Now  the  purpose  for  which  God  sent  Jesus  in  the  flesh 
is  declared  to  be  the  condemnation  of  sin,  its  condemnation 
''in  the  flesh."  This  cannot  on  the  one  hand  mean  that 
God  through  the  sinless  life  of  Jesus  pronounced  a  con- 
demnation of  sin,  or  exhibited  sin  in  an  eminent  manner  as 
condemnable,  or  on  the  other  that  his  condemnation  of 
sin  was  simply  the  ethical  overcoming  of  it  by  Christ.  Sin 
was  already  condemned  by  the  law  so  far  as  the  announce- 
ment of  its  wrong  and  its  penalty  is  concerned,  and  the 
idea  of  overcoming  is  not  conveyed  in  "condemnation" 
(^Kardicpifia)  or  in  the  verb  {KaraicpLveiv).  Besides,  it  were 
an  awkward  expression  to  say  that  God  overcame  sin  in 
the  moral  victory  of  Christ.  The  apostle's  thought  is  that 
God  condemned  sin  in  the  flesh  of  Christ  by  executing 
upon  him  in  the  flesh  the  judgment  of  condemnation 
originally  pronounced  upon  sin,  that  is,  death.  That  this 
death  was  substitutional,  the  act  of  one  appointed  to  per- 
form it  as  the  representative  of  mankind,  is  clear,  not  only 
from  the  analogy  of  the  apostle's  thought,  but  also  from 
the  connection  of  the  passage  in  question.  The  design  of 
this  offering  was  "that  the  righteousness  of  the  law  might 
be  fulfilled  in  us  who  walk  not  after  the  flesh,  but  after  the 
Spirit" — in  us  who  could  accomplish  no  righteousness  by 
obedience  to  the  law,  and  could  come  into  the  liberty  of 
"the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life"  only  after  Christ  by  his 


266  THE    TEACHER 

death  had  become  *'the  end  of  the  law"  by  satisfying  its 
demands.* 

That  the  death  of  Christ  was  regarded  by  Paul  as  repre- 
sentative is  evident  from  2  Cor.  v.  14:  "Because  we  thus 
judge,  that  if  one  died  for  all  then  were  all  dead"  (cor- 
rectly, ''then  all  died").  Pfleiderer  regards  this  passage, 
rightly  interpreted,  as  ''  the  key  to  the  Pauline  doctrine  of 
salvation."  Christ  is  so  identified  with  the  human  race 
that  his  real  death  is  ideally  the  death  of  all.  Accordingly, 
*'for"  in  the  usage  of  Paul  when  he  is  treating  of  the 
relation  of  Christ's  atonement  to  man  does  not  mean  ''for 
the  benefit  of,"  but  denotes  the  representative  character  of 
the  transaction  on  the  cross,  "the  head  of  every  man"  (i 
Cor.  xi.  3)  performing  an  act  in  which  all  participate. 
This  conception  of  solidarity  was  familiar  to  the  ancients, 
and  appears  in  Paul's  doctrine  of  the  relation  of  the  first 

*  Holsten,  whose  posthumous  work  (^Das Evangelitim  des Tau/us,Thei\,  II., 
die  paulinische  Theologie)  comes  to  the  writer's  hand  as  this  book  is  going 
through  the  press,  admirably  remarks  (pp.  54,  55)  :  "  Through  the  substitu- 
tional atoning  death  those  who  were  destined  to  salvation  were  unburdened  of 
their  sins  and  their  punishment.  .  .  .  Here  Paul's  logical  thought  tran- 
scended the  ideas  of  Peter  and  the  Jewish  Christians.  Peter  saw  in  the  death 
of  the  Messiah  on  the  cross  a  death  for  our  sins;  but  he  did  not  go  beyond  the 
negative  notion  of  the  forgiveness  of  past  transgressions.  For  real,  positive 
righteousness  he  held  fast  the  principle  of  the  law,  the  actual  fulfilling  of  its 
commandments  by  those  whose  sins  were  forgiven.  .  .  .  His  principle  of  salva- 
tion was  the  connection  of  faith  and  works  (tt torts  koX  epya).  This  was  the 
essence  of  his  gospel  of  the  circumcision ;  and  because  the  gospel  was  bound 
to  the  law,  it  could  be  preached  only  to  the  Jews,  to  whom  the  law  was  given. 
But  here  appeared  the  illogicalness  of  Peter's  thinking.  If  the  believers 
should  acquire  righteousness  by  keeping  the  law,  and  could  they  do  this  after 
the  death  of  the  Messiah,  then  they  might  have  done  it  before  his  death.  In 
that  case,  then,  his  death  was  superfluous  (Gal.  ii.  21).  .  .  .  Paul  therefore 
drew  the  conclusion :  This  death  as  a  death  for  salvation  is  not  only  forgive- 
ness of  sin,  but  also  bestowal  of  righteousness  [by  the  decree  of  God]  without 
man's  acts  of  obedience  to  the  law.  .  .  .  Thus  the  Jewish  idea  of  righteousness 
passes  over  into  the  Pauline  conception  of  justification,  yz^5///za  m\.o  justificatio, 
although  the  word  SiKciiocriJfT;  remains." 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  TONEMENT  26/ 

and  the  last  Adam  to  mankind  — the  one  standing  at  the 
head  of  the  order  of  sin  and  death,  the  other  at  the  head 
of  the  order  of  righteousness  and  life,  so  that,  ''as  by  one 
man's  disobedience  many  were  made  sinners,  so  by  the 
obedience  of  one  [unto  death]  shall  many  be  made 
righteous"  (Rom.  v.  19).  It  is  evident  that  by  the  ex- 
pression, ''  all  died,"  Paul  does  not  mean  that  all  actually 
died  ;  and  it  is  certain  also  that  he  did  not  have  in  mind  a 
gradual  moral  conquest  of  evil.  A  process  of  ethical 
growth  in  accordance  with  the  natural  order  was  not  in  his 
thought.  The  process  as  it  presented  itself  to  him  was 
supernatural.  Christ,  the  supernatural  representative  of 
the  race,  ''  the  man  from  heaven,"  died  for  all,  and  in  his 
death  all  men  suddenly,  supernaturally  died  in  an  ideal 
sense.  In  dying  he  put  off  the  flesh,  the  seat  of  sin, 
destroyed  "the  body  of  sin,"  ''died  unto  sin  once"  (Rom. 
vi.  6,  10),  to  the  law  and  all  legal  limitations  (Rom.  vii.  4), 
to  distinctions  of  race,  and  to  the  world  (Gal.  iii.  28,  vi.  14). 
The  result  of  this  substitutional  death  is  the  dying  of 
all  men  in  similar  relations,  so  that  the  apostle  could 
speak  of  them  as  "crucified  with"  Christ  (Rom.    vi.   6; 

Gal.  ii.  20). 

The  interpretation  of  this  passage  should  not  be  con- 
fused by  raising  such  a  question  as,  "  If  Paul  held  that 
Christ  died  representatively  for  all  men,  how  could  he  then 
say  that  all  men  died,  since  his  death  in  their  stead  should 
render  theirs  unnecessary.?"  For  Paul  does  not  think  of 
men  as  dying  the  kind  of  death  that  Christ  died.  In 
becoming  a  "curse"  for  them,  he  received  in  his  flesh  the 
penalty  of  sin,  which  is  death,  broke  the  power  of  sin  when 
its  sentence  of  condemnation  was  executed  upon  him,  and 
having  satisfied  the  law  abolished  it.  Men  are  thus 
dehvered  from  the  law  and  from  sin  and  from  death  the 
consequence  of  sin  or  from  the  "perishing"  which  is  the 


268  THE    TEACHER 

deprivation  of  the  resurrection  and  of  the  ''  Ufe "  of 
the  kingdom.  This  deHverance  is  their  ideal  dying  in 
the  death  of  Christ.  Their  **old  man  is  crucified  with 
him,  that  the  body  of  sin  might  be  destroyed,"  and  having 
thus  died  they  are  "freed  from  sin."  Its  penalty  was 
paid  by  Christ  in  his  death,  and  by  virtue  of  their  partici- 
pation in  it  they  are  freed  from  sin  (Rom.  vi.  6-Z\ 
While  it  is  evident  that  according  to  the  passage  in 
question  man  has  nothing  to  do  in  the  atonement,  the 
entire  transaction  being  conducted  by  God  and  Christ,  it 
must  not  be  interpreted  in  the  sense  that  the  advantage 
accrues  to  all  men  unconditionally.  In  fact,  all  men  did 
not  die  with  Christ.  The  benefits  of  his  sacrifice  accrue 
only  to  those  who  believe  on  him.  Upon  all  others 
"  sudden  destruction  "  will  come  in  *'  the  day  of  the  Lord  " 
(i  Thess.  V.  2,  3).  In  the  same  sense  must  the  words  be 
understood  :  "  Being  now  justified  by  his  blood,  we  shall 
be  saved  from  wrath  through  him "  (Rom.  v.  9).  The 
atonement  is  devised  of  God,  performed  by  Christ,  and 
offered  to  men.  Those  who  actually  "  receive  "  it  are  the 
''we"  so  often  employed  by  the  apostle  to  designate  the 
believers.  These  are  ''justified  by  his  [Christ's]  blood," 
and  are  saved  from  the  wrath  of  God  expressed  in  the 
remorseless  operation  of  the  law.  Those  who  do  not 
receive  the  proffered  grace  remain  "enemies,"  are  shut  out 
from  the  fellowship  of  the  life  in  Christ  and  in  the  Spirit 
in  their  earthly  existence,  and  are  finally  overtaken  by  that 
death  from  which  there  is  no  resurrection  (Rom.  viii.  6). 

The  necessity  of  an  atonement  for  the  justification  of 
men  or  their  salvation  from  the  power  of  sin  is  un- 
equivocally expressed  in  the  words:  "Being  justified 
freely  by  his  grace  through  the  redemption  that  is  in 
Jesus  Christ,  whom  God  hath  set  forth  to  be  a  propitiation 
through  faith  in  his  blood,  to  declare  His  righteousness  for 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  T  ON  EM  EN  T  269 

the  remission  of  sins  that  are  past,  through  the  forbear- 
ance of  God"  (Rom.  iii.  24,  25).*  Here  we  find  the 
premises  of  the  apostle's  doctrine  of  salvation,  that  right- 
eousness is  through  the  "grace"  of  God,  it  being  regarded 
as  unattainable  in  the  natural  order  or  under  the  law  by 
an  endeavour  to  obey  it.  It  is,  then,  a  "free"  gift  of  God 
through  Christ,  both  of  whom  furnish  the  atonement.  It 
is  given  not  only  simply  through  Christ,  however,  but 
through  the  "  redemption  "  or  buying  off  or  ransoming 
that  is  in  him.  Him  God  "set  forth  in  his  blood"  (for 
this  is  the  correct  connection),  that  is,  through  his  sacri- 
fice, to  be  a  means  of  propitiation  on  the  condition  of  faith. 
The  idea  of  a  satisfying  sacrifice  is  so  evidently  required 
by  the  trend  of  the  passage  that  it  is  surprising  that  any 
one  should  have  found  another  meaning  in  the  word 
rendered  "propitiation"  {IXaarripiov).  That  "a  means  of 
propitiation"  or  "a  propitiatory  sacrifice"  is  the  true 
sense  of  the  term  is  now  admitted  by  most  authorities, 
and  Weiss  remarks  quite  appropriately  that  "God  can 
accomplish  His  covenant  purpose  only  when  He  either 
punishes  or  atones  the  sin  which  stands  opposed  to  it." 
Accordingly,  the  apostle  says  that  the  object  in  view  in 
the  atoning  sacrifice  of  Christ  was  that  God  might  declare 
His  righteousness  on  account  of  the  "  remission,"  that  is, 
the  passing  by  unpunished,  not  the  forgiveness,  of  former 
sins  committed  by  men.  Paul  conceives  that  God  had 
been  formerly  long-suffering,  and  that  hence  His  justice 

*  The  righteousness  of  God  is  not  here  conceived,  as  Ritsehl  will  have  it,  as 
"  a  proceeding  consistently  corresponding  to  the  salvation  of  the  believer," 
that  is,  as  only  "  grace."  But  if  it  is  benevolent,  since  it  accepts  an  atonement, 
it  is  also  regarded  as  just  in  that  it  demands  the  satisfaction  of  the  law,  and 
declares  no  one  righteous  until  the  penalty  of  his  sins  is  paid.  The  acceptance 
of  a  substitute  may  not  correspond  to  our  idea  of  justice,  either  in  respect  to 
"past"  or  present  sins,  but  we  do  not  look  at  the  matter  from  Paul's  point  of 
view. 


2/0  THE    TEACHER 

had  not  been  adequately  expressed.  God  was  not  in 
accord  with  Himself,  since  there  were  ''sins  that  were 
past "  which  had  neither  been  adequately  punished  nor 
indeed  forgiven  for  want  of  an  atonement.* 

But  in  the  suffering  of  Christ,  in  his  bearing  of  "the 
curse  of  the  law,"  God  manifests  His  righteousness  in 
showing  that  He  cannot  altogether  pass  by  and  disregard 
sin,  but  that  He  can  be  "just"  in  requiring  an  atonement 
and  merciful  in  being  "the  justifier  of  him  who  believeth 
in  Jesus."  Thus  according  to  2  Cor.  v.  21  :  "He  made 
him  to  be  sin  who  knew  no  sin,  that  we  might  be  made 
the  righteousness  of  God  in  him,"  He  does  "not  impute 
their  trespasses"  to  men  (verse  19),  because  Christ  as 
their  representative  stands  in  their  place,  that  is,  in  suffer- 
ing death,  the  penalty  of  sin,  is  treated  as  if  he  were  sin 
itself.  There  is  an  imputation  of  man's  sin  to  Christ  and 
of  Christ's  righteousness  to  man.  This  Pauline  idea  of 
ransom  appears  in  most  distinct  expression  outside  his 
writings  in  the  New  Testament.  The  writer  of  i  Timothy 
speaks  of  Christ  as  one  who  "gave  himself  a  ransom  for 

*  Holsten  {tit  supra,  pp.  56,  57)  denies  that  Paul  conceived  of  Christ's 
death  as  a  sacrifice  for  sin.  "  The  sacrifice,"  he  says,  "  is  always  an  act  of  man 
for  God,"  while  the  apostle  "  regarded,  and  must  have  regarded,  the  death  of 
the  Messiah  as  an  act  of  God  and  of  the  Messiah."  .  .  .  "  It  is  ever  only  the 
death  of  Christ,  which  as  the  death  of  one  not  sinning  atones  for  the  sin  of  the 
sinning."  His  death  is  a  "^amros  IXaar-^Qptos  for  the  sinner."  ...  If  Paul 
"  apprehends  it  as  an  diroXvTpcoaLs,  the  death  of  the  Messiah  is  a  ransom 
which  this  one  pays  to  the  power  of  sin  and  the  law,  in  order  to  satisfy  their 
claims  upon  sinful  man  and  upon  his  death."  Paul,  however,  conceived  of  the 
Messiah  as  "  the  man  from  heaven,"  who  in  his  death  was  a  representative  of 
the  human  race.  As  an  "  act  of  God  "  his  atonement  was  an  expression  of 
God's  love;  as  his  own  act,  he  "gave  [sacrificed]  himself  for  man"  (Gal.  ii.  20). 
As  an  iXaarripLou  (Rom.  iii.  25)  he  may  be  regarded  as  an  atoning  sacrifice. 
But  this  is  not  Ritschl's  idea  of  sacrifice,  which  is  devoid  of  all  atoning  quality. 
On  the  "  theory  of  sacrifice  "  the  student  may  consult  Holtzmann's  Neiitest. 

Theol.  ii.  pp.   102  ff.;   and  on  Ritschl's  doctrine,  Pfleiderer,  Die  RitschVsche 

Theologie,  pp.  49  ff. 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  TONEMENT  2/ 1 

all"  (ii.  6).  The  same  term  is  employed  in  Matt.  xx.  28 
and  Mark  x.  45.  In  the  latter  passage  we  have  ''  a  ransom 
in  place  of  many"  (Xvrpov  clvtI  iroXkoyv),  and  in  Titus  ii. 
14,  "  He  gave  himself  for  us  {virep  r)fj.Mv)  in  order  that 
he  might  redeem  us  {XvrpfoarjraL).  Menegoz  thinks  that 
the  two  ideas,  ''for"  (in  behalf  of)  and  "in  the  place  of," 
were  confounded  in  the  thought  of  Paul.  In  the  expres- 
sion of  the  idea  of  substitution  it  is  worthy  of  note  that 
the  victim  is  never  represented  either  by  Paul  or  the  writer 
of  Isaiah  liii.  as  the  object  of  the  divine  wrath.  Accord- 
ingly, it  may  be  that  the  apostle  chose  with  forethought  to 
say,  not  that  Christ  was  accursed,  but  that  he  was  ''  made  a 
curse,"  and  not  that  he  was  made  a  sinner,  but  sin.  In 
accordance  with  his  conception  of  the  relation  between  God 
and  the  Son  he  could  not  have  spoken  otherwise. 

The  ethical  theory  of  the  atonement,  according  to  which 
the  work  of  Christ  resulted  in  effecting  in  men  a  new  spir- 
itual life,  is  not  without  support  in  the  Epistles  of  Paul. 
Its  capital  error  is  that  it  claims  to  be   a  complete  and 
sufficient  explanation  of  the  Pauline  doctrine,  whereas  in 
fact  it  is  only  one  side  of  it.    That  Paul  attached  an  ethical 
significance  to  the  death  of    Christ  cannot   be  disputed. 
But  to  him  the  ethical  value  of  the  atonement  was  entirely 
dependent  on  the  validity  of  the  juridical  principle.     Both 
aspects  of  it  were  inseparably  connected  in  his  thought  with 
the  death  of  Christ.     The  transactions  on  Calvary  and  at 
the  sepulchre  — the  crucifixion  and  the  resurrection  — were 
the  two  conditions  without  which  he  could  have  constructed 
no  soteriology.      His    doctrine  of  salvation  is   essentially 
contained  in  the  declaration  that  Christ  "  was  delivered  [to 
death]  for  our  offences  [to  expiate  them],  and  was  raised 
again  for  our  justification  "  (Rom.  iv.  25).    The  two  events 
were  inseparable  in  the  apostle's  thought  as  factors  in  the 
atonement.     He  did  not  think  of  the  resurrection  as  effect- 


272  THE    TEACHER 

ing  of  itself  man's  justification.  R.ather  according  to  the 
analogy  of  his  teaching  this  was  due  to  the  death  of  Christ. 
But  since  justification  is  absolutely  conditioned  upon  faith, 
and  faith  upon  the  resurrection,  the  latter  was  consistently 
emphasised  as  it  is  in  this  passage.  The  dependence  of 
the  ethical  aspect  of  the  atonement  upon  the  expiatory 
principle  is  illustrated  in  the  passage  previously  considered  : 
"  If  one  died  for  all,  then  all  died."  The  ideal  death  of  men 
to  sin  and  the  flesh  is  here  made  dependent  upon  the  rep- 
resentative death  of  Christ.  Only  because  in  his  sacrifice 
deliverance  is  effected  from  the  guilt  of  sin,  and  because 
he  became  ''the  end  of  the  law"  which  caused  sin  to 
"  abound,"  was  it  conceived  possible  that  the  new  "  law  of 
the  spirit  of  life,"  the  new  ethical  order,  could  be  intro- 
duced. In  the  old  order  "  sin  reigned  unto  death,"  but  in 
the  new  order  "  grace  reigns  through  righteousness  [that 
is  imputed  to  the  believers]  unto  eternal  life  by  Jesus 
Christ  our  Lord  "  (Rom.  v.  21). 

The  new  moral-spiritual  life  which  the  death  of  Christ 
has  made  possible  receives  a  mystical  expression  in  the 
earnest  and  pointed  questions  which  the  apostle  addresses 
to  the  Romans  :  "  How  shall  we  that  are  dead  to  sin  live 
any  longer  therein  1  Know  ye  not  that  as  many  of  us  as 
were  baptized  into  Jesus  were  baptized  into  his  death } " 
His  conclusion  is  :  "  Therefore,  we  are  buried  with  him  by 
baptism  into  death,  that,  like  as  Christ  was  raised  up  from 
the  dead  by  the  glory  of  the  Father,  even  so  we  also  should 
walk  in  newness  of  life"  (Rom.  vi.  2-4).  It  cannot  escape 
the  attentive  reader  that  the  apostle  here  bases  the  ethical- 
religious  life  of  the  believers  upon  the  fundamental  fact  of 
the  death  of  Christ.  It  is  because  of  its  representative 
character  and  their  participation  in  it  that  they  are  "  dead 
to  sin,"  or  in  other  words,  "  in  that  he  died,  he  died  to  sin 
once"  (Rom.  vi.  10),  and  with  him  they,   having  ideally 


SA  L  VA  TION—  A  TONEMENT  2/3 

died,  are  ''justified  [set  free]  from  sin."  *  He  through  pay- 
ing- the  penalty  of  sin,  which  is  death,  becomes  free  from 
it,  having  satisfied  its  claims.  Participants  in  his  death, 
the  Christians  enter  into  his  ''glorious  liberty,*'  being  "no 
longer  debtors  to  the  flesh,  to  live  after  the  flesh,"  that  is, 
to  live  in  sin  (Rom.  viii.  12).  Hence  the  incompatibility  of 
a  life  in  sin  with  the  believers'  condition  of  death  to  sin 
(Rom.  vi.  2),  and  hence  the  practical  moral  force  of  the 
doctrine  of  the  atonement.  A  glorious  and  inspiring  hope 
also  sprang  from  this  doctrine — a  hope  the  influence  of 
which  upon  the  fortunes  of  the  primitive  church  and  of 
Christendom  can  scarcely  be  estimated,  although  its  origi- 
nal Pauline  basis  may  have  early  disappeared.  Christ's 
sacrifice  cancelled  the  claim  of  death,  so  that  the  apostle 
declares  that  "death  hath  no  more  dominion  over  him" 
(Rom.  vi.  9). 

In  like  manner,  the  believers,  who  had  come  into  the  fel- 

*  Pfleiderer's  lucid  exposition  of  this  passage  is  here  subjoined  :  "  The  formula, 
TTi  afMapTtq.  dir^davev  i(pdTra^,  is  misunderstood  by  most  exegetes,  because  they 
mistake  the  juristic  way  of  regarding  the  matter  which  is,  however,  clearly 
enough  expressed  in  verse  7,  and  which  everywhere  forms  the  basis  of  the 
Pauline  doctrine  of  the  atonement.  The  words  mean  neither  that  Christ  mor- 
ally died  to  sin  —  that  would  presuppose  that  he  had  formerly  lived  to  it,  and 
thus  that  he  did  not  know  no  sin  (2  Cor.  v.  21)— nor  also  that  by  his  death 
he  stepped  out  of  relation  to  the  sin  of  men  which  surrounded  and  tormented 
him  —  a  trivial  thought,  with  which  the  idea  of  the  removal  of  the  dominion  of 
sin  over  Christians  that  dominates  the  whole  section  would  stand  in  no  per- 
ceptible connection.  But  the  sin  is  here,  as  in  v.  21,  and  as  immediately  before 
edvaros,  death,  represented  as  a  sort  of  personal  ruling  power  which  on  the 
ground  of  the  divine  decree  (KpiiJ.a  and  KaraKpLfxa,  v.  16,  18)  exercises  its  do- 
minion in  effecting  death  in  mankind.  Christ  let  sin  have  this  its  right  in 
dying  for  mankind  the  death  which  was  a  curse,  and  thus  fidfilled  once  for  all 
[received  in  himself]  the  curse  which  sin  works,  and  thereby  at  the  same  time 
removed  it.  One  may  thus  designate  dfiapric}  as  a  dative  commodi  and  inco7n- 
niodi  both  at  once.  Exactly  so  according  to  Paul  is  the  death  of  Christ  related 
to  the  law.  While  he  paid  it  its  tribute  (Gal.  iii.  13),  he  at  the  same  time 
wrung  from  it  its  right."  — Patdinismus,  2te  Auflage,  p.  146. 
T 


2/4  THE    TEACHER 

lowship  of  Jesus'  death,  were  free  from  the  same  dominion  ; 
though  their  outward  man  might  perish,  their  inward  man 
was  renewed  from  day  to  day,  and  when  the  trump  of  the 
Parousia  should  sound,  they  would  be  clothed  upon  with 
bodies  of  glory,  and  enter  into  the  kingdom  prepared  for 
them  from  the  foundation  of  the  world  :  "  For  if  we  be 
dead  with  Christ,  we  believe  that  we  shall  also  live  with 
him."  There  is  liberty  also  from  the  bondage  of  the  fruit- 
less endeavour  to  attain  righteousness  by  fulfilling  the  law. 
To  all  who  believed,  Christ  was  ''the  end  of  the  law." 
"  The  law  has  dominion  over  a  man  as  long  as  he  lives." 
But  ''  by  the  body  of  Christ  [which  died  to  the  law]  ye  are 
become  dead  to  the  law  "  (Rom.  vii.  i,  4).  Now  by  means 
of  this  mysterious  union  with  Christ  in  his  death  the  be- 
lievers enter  upon  a  new  order  of  life  in  which  righteous- 
ness is  accounted  not  of  works,  but  of  faith  which  is 
"imputed  for  righteousness"  (Rom.  iv.  22).  They  "are 
delivered  from  the  law,  that  being  dead  wherein  they  were 
held,  that  they  should  serve  in  the  newness  of  the  Spirit  and 
not  in  the  oldness  of  the  letter,"  In  their  new  spiritual  life 
they  are  "married  to  another,  even  to  him  who  was  raised 
from  the  dead  that  they  should  bring  forth  fruit  unto  God  " 
(Rom.  vii.  4,  6).  They  have  also  been  raised  with  him,  and 
their  old  man  having  been  crucified  with  him  they  become 
partakers  of  the  glorious  life  of  the  Spirit  in  which  he  lives 
in  his  celestial  estate  (Rom.  vi.  6,  11).  It  is  no  merely 
natural  moral-religious  development  of  which  the  apostle 
speaks  in  the  exalted  strain  of  Romans  vi.  The  supernatu- 
ral atonement  is  consummated  in  a  supernatural  religious 
condition  dominated  by  the  divine  Spirit,  and  the  miracu- 
lous end  will  be  nothing  less  than  the  coming  of  the  king- 
dom with  its  catastrophe,  its  victory,  and  its  disasters. 

The  reader  will  have  observed  that  the  apostle's  doctrine 
of  salvation  appears  to  be  adapted  only  to  the  Jews  accord- 


SA  L  VA  riON—  A 1  'ON EM  EN  T  2/5 

ing  to  its  prominent  features.  Primarily  it  was  to  those 
who  were  ''under  the  law"  that  Christ  through  his  death 
became  "the  end  of  law."  Yet  Paul  was  preeminently  the 
apostle  to  the  gentiles,  and  when  God  revealed  His  Son  m 
him,  it  was  that  he  ''might  preach  him  among  the  heathen" 
(Gal.  i.  i6).  He  does  not  explicitly  state  in  what  relation 
he  conceived  the  gentiles  to  stand  to  the  expiatory  death 
of  Christ,  which  redeemed  "  us,"  the  Jews,  "from  the  curse 
of  the  law,"iie  having  been  made  a  curse  for  "us."  But 
in  the  immediate  connection  (Gal.  iii.  13,  14)  he  says  that 
this  was  done  "  that  the  blessing  of  Abraham  might  come 
on  the  gentiles  through  Jesus  Christ,  that  we  [Jews  and 
gentiles]  might  receive  the  promise  of  the  Spirit  through 
faith."  He  seems  to  have  thought  that  the  promise  to 
Abraham  that  in  his  seed  should  all  nations  be  blessed 
primarily  concerned  the  Jews,  and  could  not  be  realised 
either  for  them  or  for  the  gentiles  until,  after  the  abolition 
of  the  law  and  of  the  dispensation  of  works  through  the 
death  of  Christ,  the  new  order  of  righteousness  by  faith 
should  be  established,  or  rather  reestablished,  for  he  re- 
garded it  as  actually  grounded  in  Abraham  whose  faith 
was  accounted  to  him  for  righteousness.  But  the  law  had 
intervened,  "added  because  of  transgressions,"  that  is,  to 
call  them  forth  (Rom.  iii.  20),  until  "the  seed  [Christ] 
should  come,"  and  it  must  be  abrogated  by  the  cross  be- 
fore either  Jews  or  gentiles  could  receive  the  promise  of  the 
Spirit.  Moreover,  the  gentiles,  while  not  technically  under 
the  Mosaic  dispensation,  were  nevertheless  conceived  as 
under  law  and  responsible  to  its  requirements  "written  in 
their  hearts"  (Rom.  ii.  12,  15). 

If,  then,  the  Jews  with  all  the  "advantage"  (Rom.  iii.  i) 
that  they  had  could  not  be  saved  by  works,  how  much  less 
the  gentiles,  who  had  only  the  inward  light  and  not  the 
"oracles  of  God."     According  to  the  premises  of  his  doc- 


2/6  THE    TEACHER 

trine  of  the  person  of  Christ  Paul  could  not  but  include  the 
gentiles  in  the  scheme  of  redemption.  For  to  him  Christ 
was  not  simply  the  Jewish  Messiah,  "born  of  the  seed  of 
David  according  to  the  flesh,"  but  as  the  son  of  God  was 
also  the  representative  head  of  the  human  race,  and  in  his 
death  made  atonement  for  ''all"  (2  Cor.  v.  14,  15,  19). 
Thus  the  offer  of  salvation  was  extended  to  as  many 
through  the  last  Adam  as  the  condemnation  that  came 
through  the  first  Adam  had  reached.  It  is  difficult  to  de- 
termine, however,  whether  in  the  apostle's  thought  the 
blessing  would  ultimately  neutralise  the  curse.  At  the 
beginning  the  advantage  was  on  the  side  of  sin  and  death 
on  account  of  the  flesh  with  its  passions  and  lusts,  the 
carnal  mind,  which  is  "not  subject  to  the  law  of  God, 
neither  indeed  can  be."  The  stream  of  natural  tendency 
sweeps  with  fatal  force  downward  toward  the  abyss.  On 
the  other  hand  the  atonement  effects  no  absolute  restora- 
tion, is  no  unconditional  counteracting  of  the  fall.  It  is 
effective  only  so  far  as  it  is  voluntarily  appropriated. 
Those  alone  die  with  Christ  to  the  flesh  and  sin  who 
choose  to  "receive"  the  atonement.  In  view  of  the  meagre 
results  of  the  apostle's  mission,  and  in  particular  of  the 
opposition  and  hostility  of  the  Jews,  there  would  appear  to 
be  no  very  good  prospect  of  an  extended  conquest  of  the 
powers  of  "the  world"  before  the  time  of  the  approaching 
Parousia  and  judgment.  Yet  he  is  so  optimistic  as  to 
expect  "the  fulness  of  the  gentiles"  "to  come  in,"  and  "all 
Israel"  to  be  "saved"  (Rom.  xi.  25,  26)  —  a  consummation 
which  calls  forth  from  him  an  exclamation  on  "the  depth 
of  the  riches  both  of  the  wisdom  and  knowledge  of  God," 
"of  whom  and  through  whom  and  to  whom  are  all  things." 
This  recognition  of  the  love  of  God  does  not  first  appear 
in  the  apostle's  doctrine  when  he  takes  into  consideration 
the   consummation   of  the  work  of  Christ.     As  we  have 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  TONE  MEN  T  2  // 

already  seen,  the  idea  of  the  divine  love  underlies  the  entire 
scheme  of  the  atonement,  which  is,  indeed,  preeminently 
the  way  in  which  "God  commendeth  His  love  toward  us" 
(Rom.  V.  8).  But  the  apostle  dwells  especially  upon  this 
aspect  of  the  divine  nature  when  he  comes  to  consider  the 
practical,  ethical  side  of  the  work  of  God  in  Christ.  The 
conception  of  God  as  a  being  who  on  the  one  hand  insists 
inexorably  on  the  exaction  of  the  penalty  of  sin  upon  the 
person  of  the  sinner  or  upon  a  substitute,  and  on  the  other 
is  so  abounding  in  love  as  to  institute  and  carry  out  a  plan 
of  atonement  whereby  men  might  be  saved  from  His 
''wrath,"  was  not  so  difficult  to  the  apostle  from  his  Old 
Testament  and  later  Jewish  point  of  view  that  he  felt  a 
necessity  of  attempting  a  reconciliation.  In  any  case,  the 
severity  and  hardness,  the  almost  mechanical  aspect  of  sal- 
vation, which  appear  in  the  strictly  judicial  side  of  the  doc- 
trine of  the  atonement,  drop  out  of  sight  when  he  dwells 
upon  the  fellowship  of  the  believer  with  Christ  and  the 
blessed  endowment  of  the  Spirit.  In  this  new  relation, 
which,  however,  we  must  not  forget,  is  due  to  the  awful 
sacrifice  on  Calvary,  by  which  the  demands  of  the  law  were 
satisfied,  the  believer  is  a  "new  creation"  ;  "old  things  are 
passed  away,  and  behold  all  things  are  new"  ;  "the  fearful 
looking  for  of  judgment"  is  no  more;  no  longer  is  the 
doubtful  contest  waged  between  the  law  in  the  members 
and  the  mind  which  would  gladly  serve  the  law  of  God  ; 
and  out  of  the  dread  bondage  to  the  flesh  and  the  ever- 
menacing  law  he  has  emerged  into  the  liberty  and  peace 
of  assured  sonship. 

Accordingly,  the  apostle  strikes  the  note  of  joy  and 
triumph  in  the  eighth  of  Romans  in  marked  contrast  with 
the  despair,  the  lamentation,  and  the  cry  for  deliverance  in 
the  seventh  :  "There  is  therefore  now  no  condemnation  to 
them  who  are  in  Christ  Jesus,  who  walk  not  after  the  flesh, 


278  THE    TEACHER 

but  after  the  Spirit.  For  the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life  in 
Jesus  Christ  hath  made  me  *  free  from  the  law  of  sin  and 
death."  The  fruitless  struggle  of  the  carnal  man  to  keep 
the  law  is  no  more  ;  but  "  the  Spirit  helpeth  our  infirmi- 
ties." In  baptism  the  believer  has  died  with  Christ  to  the 
flesh  and  sin,  and  been  raised  to  "newness  of  life";  thus 
''the  body  is  dead  because  of  sin,"  for  it  was  on  account  of 
sin  that  it  must  ideally  die  with  Christ  in  the  baptismal 
rite,  and  in  this  blessed  estate  of  moral-religious  experience, 
the  indwelling  "  Spirit  is  life  because  of  righteousness." 
The  apostle's  recognition  of  the  ethical  aspect  of  the 
atonement  is  apparent  in  the  note  of  exhortation  and  ad- 
monition which  he  sounds,  particularly  in  the  sixth  of 
Romans.  Having  been  mystically  buried  with  Christ  in 
baptism  into  death,  that  is  into  death  to  sin  through  fellow- 
ship with  Christ's  death,  who  died  to  sin,  the  believer 
should  practically  by  his  own  choice  and  will  live  worthy  of 
his  high  calling,  and  as  Christ  was  raised  up  from  the  dead, 
so  ought  he  also  to  "  walk  in  newness  of  life."  His  mem- 
bers should  not  be  yielded  as  instruments  of  unrighteous- 
ness, but  of  righteousness  unto  God.  The  background  of 
supernaturalism  remains  in  the  atonement,  in  the  mystic 
dying  with  Christ,  and  in  the  operations  of  the  Holy  Spirit ; 
but  side  by  side  with  the  interference  of  supersensible 
powers  for  the  Christian's  salvation  goes  his  own  obligation 
to  have  his  ''fruit  unto  holiness."  His  doctrine  of  death 
as  the  penalty  of  sin  and  of  the  expiation  of  sin  by  the 
death  of  an  innocent  substitute  under  the  conception  of  the 
solidarity  of  the  race  Paul  derived  from  the  theology  of 
his  people.  His  rigorous  application  of  these  doctrines  to 
the  office  of  Christ  in  relation  to  men  constitutes  the 
juridical  side  of  his  teaching  of  the  atonement. 

But  the  idea  of  a  renewal  of  the  life  by  a  mystic  union 

*  "Thee  "  (de)  according  to  K  BFG. 


SAL  VA  TION—  A  7  'ONE  MEN  T  2/9 

with  Christ  and  of  the  operatioii  of  the  Spirit  in  the  pro- 
duction of  the  common  Christian  virtues  was  original  with 
the  apostle,  and  reveals  the  penetration  of  his  spiritual 
insight  and  the  force  of  his  religious  genius.  His  total 
conception  of  man  and  his  relation  to  God  was  not,  how- 
ever, destined  to  prevail  in  subsequent  ages,  which  could 
accept  it  only  with  radical  modifications  and  exceptions. 
With  an  anthropology  which  does  not  regard  death  as  the 
penalty  of  sin  his  doctrine  of  the  death  of  Christ  as  an 
atonement  for  the  sins  of  the  world  is  irreconcilable.  An 
ethics  which  interprets  human  conduct  by  the  spirit  rather 
than  by  the  letter,  and  regards  the  good  purpose  and  in- 
tention as  virtues,  though  they  often  fail  of  a  complete 
obedience,  cannot  approve  his  teaching  regarding  the  in- 
efficacy  of  works.  To  a  philosophy  which  does  not  regard 
sin  as  an  offence  entailing  eternal  death,  but  as  an  incident 
in  the  course  of  human  evolution,  which  draws  after  it 
consequences  that  are  disciplinary  and  educational  to  the 
individual  and  the  race,  and  that  have  no  further  signifi- 
cance or  issue,  his  whole  doctrine  of  a  closed  and  arbitrary 
penalty  must  be  unacceptable.  With  that  doctrine  must 
fall  the  theory  of  an  atonement  which  intervenes  to  arrest 
the  course  of  natural  development.  An  age  which  does 
not  look  for  the  immediate  coming  of  the  kingdom  of  God 
with  catastrophes  and  disasters  of  judgment  cannot  regard 
salvation  as  a  deliverance  from  an  impending  definite  peril, 
which  is  to  be  sought  with  such  stress  and  urgency  and 
with  such  indifference  to  temporal  relations  as  he  enjoined. 
Finally,  his  doctrine  of  a  mystic  fellowship  of  the  Christian 
with  Christ  must  undergo  radical  modifications  with  respect 
to  its  supernaturalism  in  an  age  in  which  the  spiritual  life  of 
man  is  not  regarded  as  an  exception  to  the  universal  sway 
of  natural  law. 


CHAPTER   XII 

THE  PERSON  OF  CHRIST* 

THE  last  and  most  important  task  of  the  higher  criti- 
cism of  the  New  Testament  is  to  determine  the 
historical  setting  of  the  doctrines  of  its  several  books. 
As  a  procedure  which  follows  the  historical  method  it 
cannot  regard  these  doctrines  as  isolated  phenomena,  and 
treat  them  as  if  they  had  no  connection  with  antecedent 
beliefs  and  modes  of  thought.  Moreover,  it  is  forbidden 
by  its  fundamental  presuppositions  to  attempt  to  explain 
them  as  independent  supernatural  creations  rather  than  as 
the  products  of  the  thinking  of  men,  which  as  such  must  be 
conceived  as  related  to  the  antecedents  and  environments 
of  their  authors.  This  method  is  especially  necessary 
to  the  successful  study  of  the  Pauline  Christology,  since  in 
none  of  his  writings  has  the  apostle  made  a  distinctive 
statement  of  doctrine  on  the  subject,  and  his  opinions  as 
to  the  person  of  Christ  must  be  gathered  from  incidental 
words  and  phrases  belonging  to  the  discussion  of  subjects 
which  appear  to  have  interested  him  more  than  the  topic 
in  question.  While  these  scattered  intimations  of  belief 
respecting  the  person  of  Christ  must  be  subjected  to  a 
careful  exegesis  and  studied  in  their  connection,  a  know- 
ledge of  the  Messianic  ideas  which  prevailed  shortly  before 
and  at  the  time  of  the  apostle  is  indispensable  to  their 
interpretation.  For  while  the  Pauline  Christology  is  a 
transformation  of  both  the  Jewish  and  the  Jewish-Christian 
Messianism,  it  is  not  without  some  features  of  each. 

*  The  New  World,  June,  1894.     (With  revision  and  additions.) 
280 


THE  PERSON  OF  CHRIST  28 1 

While  Paul  undoubtedly  entertained  the  Messianic  hopes 
of  his  nation,  Jesus  was  to  him  the  Messiah  in  a  peculiar 
and  original  sense.  He  does  not  explicitly  define  what  he 
saw  in  the  vision  in  which  Christ  was  revealed  to  him,  or 
rather  "in"  him,  but  in  his  reference  to  it  he  employs  a 
term  which  is  frequently  used  in  the  New  Testament  to 
express  the  appearance  of  things  of  the  supersensible 
world  and  the  occurrence  of  spiritual  manifestations  {M(f)dr], 
I  Cor.  XV.  8).  The  "visions  and  revelations  of  the  Lord" 
(2  Cor.  xii.  i),  which  were  probably  not  infrequent  experi- 
ences of  his,  and  in  which  he  had  a  consciousness  of  being 
in  the  "third  heaven  "  and  hearing  "unspeakable  words," 
were  doubtless  of  this  sort.  As  a  consequence  of  these 
spiritual  intuitions  it  appears  that  his  conception  of  the 
Messiahship  was  entirely  changed.  For  he  says  that  if 
prior  to  the  true  manifestation  of  the  Christ  to  him  he  had 
known  and  accepted  a  fleshly  Messiah,  a  "  Christ  after  the 
flesh,"  yet  thereafter  he  "knew  him  so  no  more"  (2  Cor. 
v.  16).  This  "Christ  according  to  the  flesh"  was  of  the 
Israelites,  his  "kinsmen,"  to  whom  belonged  "the  cove- 
nants and  the  giving  of  the  law  "  (Rom.  ix.  4),  the  descend- 
ant of  David,  "born  of  a  woman,"  "born  under  the  law" 
(Gal.  iv.  4),  in  whom  the  national  Messianic  hopes  were 
realised  so  far  as  his  appearance  at  least  was  concerned. 

But  as  a  believer,  as  a  convert  to  the  new  spiritual  Mes- 
sianic faith,  the  apostle  declares  that  he  is  "  a  new  creature," 
and  that  he  henceforth  knows  Christ  no  longer  in  the  old 
way,  for  "  the  old  things  are  passed  away."  Now  he  knows 
him  only  as  freed  from  the  flesh  through  his  death  and 
resurrection  and  existing  in  a  heavenly  state,  "the  image 
of  God,"  a  being  of  "light"  and  "glory."  Accordingly, 
the  Christ  of  the  flesh,  the  human  Jesus,  has  no  important 
place  or  function  in  the  Christology  of  the  apostle.  If  he 
was  acquainted  with  the  tradition  of  the  life  and  teachings 


282  THE    TEACHER 

of  Jesus  he  makes  little  use  of  this  knowledge  except  in  an 
occasional  reference  to  an  aphorism.  He  founds  few  im- 
portant doctrines  upon  the  words  of  the  Master,  and  never 
appeals  to  the  Gospel-miracles  to  support  the  claims  of 
Christ  to  dignity  or  authority.  The  personality  as  well  as 
the  name  of  the  Son  of  Man  disappears  from  a  teaching 
which  shows  no  contact  with  the  freshness  and  spontaneity 
of  the  primitive  tradition  ;  and  the  kingdom  of  heaven, 
in  the  sense  in  which  it  was  the  burden  of  the  original 
message,  sinks  into  insignificance,  or  is  lost  from  view  in 
the  absorbing  interest  in  a  metaphysical  doctrine  of  the 
Christ.  The  Messiah  of  the  early  apostolic  faith,  who  was 
a  lowly  teacher,  and  was  expected  to  come  again  in  human 
form  as  the  Son  of  Man  to  sit  on  the  throne  of  judgment 
upon  all  nations,  and  to  place  his  apostles  on  twelve 
thrones  to  judge  the  twelve  tribes  of  Israel,  is  transformed 
in  the  Pauline  thought  into  the  divine  Lord  of  glory,  whose 
saving  mission  is  to  all  people,  and  who  will  come  at  length 
as  a  spiritual  personality  to  gather  in  one  fellowship  his 
dead  resurrected  and  the  living  believers  with  bodies  "  con- 
formed to  his  body  of  glory." 

Accepting  the  current  Jewish  belief  of  his  time  in  the 
inspiration  and  authority  of  the  Old  Testament  Scriptures 
Paul  regarded  Jesus  as  the  expected  Messiah  foretold  by 
the  prophets.  He  speaks  of  himself  as  ''  separated  unto  the 
gospel  of  God,  which  He  promised  atore  by  His  prophets  in 
the  Holy  Scriptures  "  (Rom.  i.  2),  and  as  to  the  ministry 
of  Jesus  he  declares  that  through  it  ''  a  righteousness  of 
God  hath  been  manifested,  being  witnessed  by  the  law  and 
the  prophets,  even  the  righteousness  of  God  through  faith 
in  Jesus  Christ"  (Rom.  iii.  21).  In  the  two  events  of  the 
career  of  the  Master  which  were  to  him  of  fundamental 
importance,  he  sees  the  fulfilment  of  foreshadowings  in 
the  ancient  sacred  writings.      "  For  I  delivered  unto  you," 


THE   PERSON   OF  CHRIST  283 

he  writes  to  the  Corinthians,  "first  of  all  that  which  also  I 
received,  how  that  Christ  died  for  our  sins  according  to  the 
Scriptures  ;  and  that  he  was  buried ;  and  that  he  hath  been 
raised  on  the  third  day  according  to  the  Scriptures  "  (i  Cor. 
XV.  3,  4).  He  does  not,  indeed,  inform  his  readers  where  the 
prophetic  passages  in  question  are  to  be  found ;  but  it  is  prob- 
able that  in  his  oral  instructions  he  had  pointed  them  out, 
and  expounded  them  in  accordance  with  the  prevailing  rab- 
binical method  of  interpreting  the  Old  Testament  which  he 
did  not  hesitate  to  employ  upon  occasion  (i  Cor,  x.  1 1  ;  Gal. 
iii.  16,  iv.  24).  It  is  evident,  however,  that  Paul's  accept- 
ance of  the  traditional  Messianism  was  merely  external 
and  formal.  In  the  national  Messiah  as  such  he  had  no 
interest  and  no  faith.  It  is  not  this  personality  whom 
he  finds  in  the  Scriptures  ;  it  is  rather  "  the  gospel  of 
God,"  "the  righteousness  of  God,"  and  the  crucified  and 
risen  Lord.  The  functions  of  the  Messiah  in  whom  he  as 
a  Christian  believed  were  not,  with  reference  to  righteous- 
ness and  the  final  consummation,  those  of  the  Messiah  of 
the  popular  faith.  In  the  Jewish  theology  it  was  laid  down 
that  the  Messiah  would  come  when  righteousness  should 
prevail  among  the  people  (Weber,  Systc7n,  p.  333); 
but  according  to  Paul  the  Christ  came  for  the  purpose 
of  bringing  them  into  this  condition. 

That  in  applying  to  Christ  the  appellation  "  Son  of  God  " 
Paul  attached  to  him  a  unique  and  exceptional  dignity 
there  can  be  no  doubt.  The  frequent  and  emphatic  use  of 
this  term  by  Paul  marks  a  distinction  between  his  writ- 
ings and  the  synoptic  Gospels,  According  to  these  latter 
records,  Jesus'  constant  self-designation  is  the  "  Son  of 
Man";  he  teaches  that  other  men  may  become  sons  of 
God  by  fulfilling  certain  conditions,  such  as  being  peace- 
makers, tells  the  disciples  that  God  is  their  Father,  and 
instructs  them   to   pray  to  Him   as   such.     The   universal 


284  THE    TEACHER 

fatherhood  of  God  is  imphed  in  such  parables  as  that  of 
the  prodigal  son  (Luke  xv.  11  f.)  and  that  of  the  two  sons 
(Matt.  xxi.  28  f.)  and  in  the  passages  Matt.  v.  45  and  Luke 
vi.  30.  When  in  these  Gospels  Jesus  is  represented  as 
calling  himself  the  Son  in  a  preeminent  sense,  he  appears 
to  express  a  relation  different  only  in  degree  from  that 
which  other  men  hold  or  may  hold  to  the  F'ather—  a  son- 
ship  attained  through  loving  obedience  and  spiritual 
communion  with  God.  Accordingly,  he  could  speak  of 
possessing  a  knowledge  of  God  surpassing  that  of  all 
others  (Matt.  xi.  27).  In  the  first  Gospel  he  is  reported  to 
have  accepted  the  title  Son  of  God,  as  a  Messianic  desig- 
nation from  the  lips  of  Peter ;  but  in  the  second  Gospel, 
which  probably  more  correctly  represents  the  original  tra- 
dition, the  appellation  is  omitted  (Matt.  xvi.  16;  Mark  viii. 
29).  But  nowhere  in  these  Gospels  is  there  an  indication 
that  he  intended  by  the  term  *'  Son  "  to  express  his  participa- 
tion in  the  divine  nature  or  a  metaphysical  relation  to  God. 
It  is  evident,  however,  that  to  Paul  the  Son  of  God  "re- 
vealed in*'  him  at  his  conversion  represented  a  conception 
of  Christ  unknown  to  the  primitive  tradition  and  to  the 
original  apostles  (Gal.  i.  15,  16).  He  had  not  recognised 
the  Jesus  ''according  to  the  flesh"  as  the  Messiah,  but 
had  vehemently  and  bitterly  opposed  him  by  persecuting 
his  followers  to  the  death.  But  as  soon  as  he  had  seen 
in  this  vision  the  Christ  according  to  the  Spirit,  the  true 
Messiah,  the  divine  Son  of  God,  he  was  furnished  with 
an  ample  revelation,  so  that  he  felt  no  need  to  ''confer 
with  flesh  and  blood"  or  to  turn  his  steps  toward  Jeru- 
salem. He  had  seen  not  the  marred  and  lowly  form  of 
the  Son  of  Man,  but  the  majestic  "  Lord  of  glory,"  and 
from  this  vision  dates  a  new  apprehension  of  Christ  and 
a  new  epoch  in  the  history  of  Christianity. 

Through  this  apprehension  of  his  person  the  cause  of 


THE  PERSON   OF  CHRIST  285 

Jesus  received  a  direction  and  development  which  it  could 
never  have  had  within  the  limits  of  the  interpretation  given 
to  it  by  the  original  apostles.  A  mere  Jewish  teacher  and 
Messiah  could  never  have  been  accepted  as  the  spiritual 
head  of  mankind.  The  world  is  now  coming,  indeed,  to 
see  that  this  man  who  delivered  great  moral  and  religious 
truths  in  aphorisms,  preached  the  brotherhood  of  man  and 
the  kingdom  of  God,  and  went  about  doing  good  was  the 
greatest  spiritual  and  ethical  teacher  of  mankind.  But 
Christianity  could  not  have  begun  to  become  a  world- 
religion  in  the  first  century,  and  could  not  have  held  sway 
over  the  minds  of  men  since,  without  a  conception  of  the 
person  of  Christ  in  which  he  was  something  more  than  a 
Jewish  teacher  who  had  been  ignominiously  put  to  death, 
and  was  expected  presently  to  come  again  to  establish  the 
national  kingdom  of  God.  There  was  needed  an  idea  of 
his  mission  which  extended  it  to  mankind,  and  a  theory  of 
his  nature  which  invested  it  with  mystical  and  metaphysi- 
cal qualities  and  relations.  Paul's  conception  of  Christol- 
ogy,  based  not  upon  historical  facts,  but  upon  speculation, 
furnished  the  impulse  which  was  necessary  to  carry  Chris- 
tianity forward  upon  its  mission  of  the  conquest  of  the 
world.  Its  dualism  answered  a  twofold  purpose.  On  the 
one  hand  it  was  a  concession  to  Jewish  Messianism  in  its 
doctrine  that  Jesus  was  "according  to  the  flesh  born  of 
the  seed  of  David/'  and  on  the  other  it  responded  to  the 
speculative  interest  in  its  metaphysical  idea  that  Christ  in 
his  higher  and  most  essential  nature  was  the  divine  Son  of 
God.  In  this  latter  phase  of  his  thought  respecting  the 
Messiah  he  was  in  contact  with  the  speculations  of  the 
Jewish  theology.  Christ  was  exalted  above  all  other  cre- 
ated beings,  men  and  angels.  To  men  was  indeed  granted 
adoption  as  sons  of  God  {vloOea-ia,  Rom.  viii.  15),  but  Christ 
was  by  nature  God's  own  (I'Sto?)  Son. 


2S6  THE    TEACHER 

To  Paul  the  person  of  Christ  was  central  and  vital  in 
his  apprehension  of  Christianity.  All  that  the  new  religion 
signified  to  him  of  relief  from  the  oppression  and  burden 
of  sin  and  the  law  and  of  hope  for  his  own  regeneration 
and  that  of  mankind  was  contained  in  his  thought  of  the 
exalted  Lord  of  glory.  As  he  put  into  his  conception  of 
the  Son  of  God  a  significance  which  is  not  contained  in 
the  synoptic  tradition,  but  which  prepared  the  way  for  the 
metaphysical  idea  of  the  Logos  of  the  fourth  Gospel,  so 
the  death  of  Christ  assumed  to  him  an  importance,  and 
contained  consequences,  wholly  foreign  to  the  minds  of  the 
primitive  disciples.  They  had  regarded  this  event  as  the 
signal  of  the  overthrow  of  their  Messianic  hopes  and  of 
their  faith  in  Jesus  as  the  one  who  "should  restore  the 
kingdom  to  Israel."  But  to  Paul  as  the  act  of  a  supernat- 
ural, metaphysical  being,  it  had  consequences  far  surpass- 
ing the  extinction  of  a  life  or  the  disappointing  of  Messianic 
expectations.  Its  results  were  conceived  as  magical  or 
miraculous.  The  existing  spiritual  order  was  shaken,  and 
"old  things"  gave  way  to  the  new  economy  of  which  the 
cross  was  the  symbol.  With  the  death  of  Jesus  mighty 
powers  of  the  former  age  became  extinct.  When  he  bowed 
his  head  upon  Calvary  the  Christ  "according  to  the  flesh," 
the  national  Jewish  Messiah,  died  never  to  live  again,  and 
the  age  of  the  spiritual  Messiah  was  ushered  in.  In  dying 
he  died  to  Judaism,  abdicated  the  Messiahship  of  a  people, 
and  assumed  the  sceptre  of  the  universal  Messiahship  of 
mankind.  By  a  spiritual  magic  which  eludes  accurate 
definition  he  put  away  the  law  not  alone  for  Jews,  but  for 
all  men,  effected  their  deliverance  from  sin,  and  by  "one 
act  of  righteousness"  secured  to  them  the  free  gift  " to 
justification  of  life."  An  offering  for  sin  he  condemned  it 
in  the  "flesh,"  and  died  unto  it  "once  for  all."  The  fet- 
ters of  man's  bondage  were  broken  by  the  abolition  of  the 


THE  PERSON   OF  CHRIST  28/ 

law  of  sin  and  death,  and  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  as- 
sumed its  beneficent  sway.  To  the  great  apostle  Calvary 
signified  the  subjugation  of  a  spiritual  world-order  of 
powers  inimical  to  man  by  the  higher  powers  of  a  new 
dispensation  of  grace. 

That  the  being  who  was  able  to  accomplish  by  his  mis- 
sion this  vast  cosmic-spiritual  transformation  was  not 
conceived  to  be  an  ordinary  human  personality  in  his 
essential  nature  goes  without  saying.  It  is  a  degradation 
of  the  apostle's  mystic  and  metaphysical  thought  by  the 
worst  kind  of  rationalism  to  interpret  his  words  so  as  to 
make  them  teach  that  one  whose  work  and  sacrifice  were 
followed  by  such  immense  consequences  affecting  the 
economy  of  salvation,  the  purposes  of  God,  and  the  entire 
human  race,  could  have  been  regarded  by  him  in  whose 
mind  the  scheme  took  form  as  "a  mere  man."  No  one  of 
the  apostle's  Christological  conceptions  has  a  more  definite 
and  precise  expression  than  this,  that  Christ  was  essen- 
tially Spirit  (irvevfjua).  The  declaration  that  ''the  Lord  is 
the  Spirit  "  is  entirely  unambiguous.  In  his  thought  the 
total  order  of  human  life  as  related  to  the  economy  of 
redemption  includes  the  celestial  and  nether  spheres  of 
existence.  It  is  the  destiny  of  the  lower  order  to  be 
uplifted  and  transformed  through  connection  with  the 
higher.  Accordingly,  the  first  man  Adam  (the  first  to 
appear  on  the  stage  of  existence)  became  a  living  soul, 
the  last  Adam,  a  life-giving  Spirit  (i  Cor.  xv.  45).  First  in 
order  of  appearance  is  that  which  is  natural  or  psychical 
{-y^rvxiKov),  then  that  which  is  spiritual  {irvevixariicov). 
Though  this  is  the  order  of  temporal  development,  it 
by  no  means  follows  that  the  spiritual  personality  sprang 
out  of  the  conditions  of  time  and  sense.  On  the  contrary, 
Paul  declares  explicitly  that  the  second  man  is  from 
heaven  (i   Cor.  xv.  47).     In  his   spiritual,  heavenly   exist- 


288  THE    TEACHER 

ence  Christ  was  conceived  by  Paul  as  a  being  possessing  a 
form  of  "glory,"  in  accordance  with  the  idea  that  spirit  is 
essentially  a  luminous  substance. 

There  is  no  real  contradiction  between  the  two  state- 
ments, that  Christ  was  ''the  image  of  God"  (i  Cor.  iv.  4) 
and  ''in  the  form  of  God"  (Phil.  ii.  6),  and  that  in  the 
resurrection  the  bodies  of  believers  would  be  "  conformed 
to  his  body  of  glory"  (Phil.  iii.  21).  For  while  Paul 
thought  him  to  be  godlike,  since  he  was  essentially 
Spirit,  he  appears  to  have  conceived  of  him  in  no  other 
way  than  "in  fashion  as  a  man,"  whether  in  his  heavenly 
or  earthly  existence.  As  "  the  light  of  the  knowledge  of 
the  glory  of  God"  was  reflected  "in  the  face  of  Jesus 
Christ,"  so  this  luminous  spiritual  effulgence  is  again 
reflected  in  the  gospel  which  is  "  the  gospel  of  the  glory 
of  Christ."  That  the  divinity  of  Christ  is  not  implied  by 
Paul  in  designating  him  "the  image  of  God"  is  evident 
from  I  Cor,  xi.  7,  where  he  says  of  man  that  he  is  "the 
image  and  glory  of  God."  In  this  connection  is  a  passage 
which  shows  how  he  combined  in  his  thought  the  divine 
sonship  and  the  perfect  humanity  of  Christ,  his  relation 
both  to  God  and  man  :  "  But  I  would  have  you  know  that 
the  head  of  every  man  is  Christ ;  and  the  head  of  the 
woman  is  the  man,  and  the  head  of  Christ  is  God  "  (verses 
3,  4).  Here  the  "head"  (/<:e(^aX?i)  of  each  class  represents 
that  one  of  whom  the  subordinate  is  the  reflected  ray  or 
"glory  "  {ho^a).  Accordingly,  the  woman  is  said  to  be  the 
glory  of  the  man,  while  the  man  is  subordinate  to  Christ, 
his  head,  who  in  turn  is  subordinate  to  God  whose  glory 
he  reflects.  Thus  is  assigned  to  Christ  a  mediate  position 
between  God  and  man.  Dependent  upon  God  on  the  one 
hand,  he  is  on  the  other  the  head  of  mankind.  As  to 
other  men,  they  are  "the  image  and  glory  of  God,"  because 
in  the   order   of   creation  Christ    is    their   head,   so   that 


THE  PERSON   OF   CHRIST  289 

mediately  through  him  their  head  is  God,  as  the  woman's 
head  is  Christ  in  and  through  the  man.  Conceived  as  to 
his  essential  nature  Christ  is  Spirit,  but  relatively  to  man 
and  the  economy  of  salvation  he  is  the  ''life-giving  Spirit  " 
which  working  in  mankind  is  destined  to  destroy  death 
and  sin  and  to  quicken  the  mortal  flesh  of  believers,  so 
that  they  shall  be  ''conformed  to  his  body  of  glory." 

The  fact,  however,  that  in  the  thought  of  Paul  Christ 
was  "the  Son  of  God"  by  preeminence,  "the  image  of 
God,"  "the  Spirit,"  a  being  of  whom  God  was  the  head, 
as  he  himself  is  the  head  of  every  man,  is  not  incompatible 
with  his  teaching,  that  in  his  nature  Christ  was  essentially 
and  only  a  man,  a  man  in  the  sense  that  does  not  admit  of 
the  idea  that  he  possessed  divine  attributes  and  was  of  the 
divine  essence.  In  writing  of  the  two  dispensations,  that 
of  sin  and  death,  and  that  of  righteousness  and  life,  the 
apostle  declares  that  "if  by  the  trespass  of  the  one 
[Adam],  the  many  died,  much  more  did  the  grace  of  God 
and  the  gift  by  the  grace  of  the  one  man  Jesus  Christ 
abound  unto  the  many"  (Rom.  v.  15).  Death  was  not  to 
have  the  victory,  for  "  since  by  man  came  death,  by  man 
came  also  the  resurrection  of  the  dead"  (i  Cor.  xv.  21). 
If  "  the  first  man  is  of  the  earth,  earthy,  the  second  man  is 
from  heaven."  These  words  admit  of  no  other  meaning 
than  that  Christ  was  by  nature  man,  as  Adam  was,  only  in 
a  higher  sense,  a  man  whose  spiritual,  transforming  power 
should  counteract  the  deadly  and  woful  influence  of  the 
earthy  progenitor  of  the  race.  The  Spirit  which  he  was 
to  Paul's  thought  (2  Cor.  iii.  17)  was  the  earnest  of  the 
victory  that  he  was  to  gain.  It  was  placed  at  the  head  of 
the  genus,  but  did  not  signify  a  superhuman  nature.  The 
higher  heavenly  principle  in  him  was  a  perfect  humanity. 
In  him  human  nature  had  its  glorified,  archetypal  form. 

Over   against    the    earthy,  psychical    man,  Adam,  who 


290  THE    TEACHER 

represented  the  human  race  subjected  to  death  through 
sin,  Christ  was  conceived  as  the  spiritual,  heavenly  man, 
"the  man  from  heaven,"  the  head  and  representative  of 
this  race  transformed,  so  far  as  it  should  come  into  touch 
with  him,  by  the  powers  of  life  into  a  condition  of  sinless- 
ness.  For  it  was  essential  and  fundamental  in  Paul's 
conception  of  Christ  that  he  was  without  sin  (/^^  7z^ou? 
ci[xapTLav,  2  Cor.  v.  21).  He  had,  indeed,  a  bodily  nature 
like  all  other  men,  but  as  the  ideal  man  he  was  superior  to 
them  in  that  his  flesh  was  not  touched  with  the  contami- 
nation of  sin.  The  expression  employed  by  Paul  for  this 
idea,  ''the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh"  (ofioico/jLa  aapKo^ 
afiaprta^,  Rom.  viii.  3),  has  received  contradictory  inter- 
pretations, and  some  have  thought  that  he  was  inconsist- 
ent with  himself  in  employing  these  words  and  asserting, 
despite  them,  that  Christ  knew  no  sin.  But  the  use  of  the 
word  "likeness"  may  be  regarded  as  intended  to  guard 
against  this  inconsistency.  Christ  came,  indeed,  in  the 
flesh,  and  was  "born  of  the  seed  of  David,"  so  that  in  his 
natural  descent  he  was,  like  all  other  men,  subject  to  the 
"  sarkical  "  conditions  to  which  in  the  usual  order  of  nature 
sin  attaches.  Yet  while  the  term  "likeness"  does  not 
carry  with  it  the  notion  that  he  had  not  a  real  body  of 
flesh  and  blood,  it  excludes  the  implication  that  in  his  flesh 
evil  tendencies  had  their  accustomed  sway.  The  humanity 
in  which  he  appeared  was  only  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh, 
not  that  of  sinful  flesh  itself.  His  body  was  formed  after 
the  likeness  of  that  flesh  to  which  sin  ordinarily  belongs  in 
human  nature.* 

*  "  Christ  is  thought  of  as  indeed  fighting  the  battle  [with  evil],  but  as  con- 
tinually victorious  by  reason  of  the  inborn  '  Spirit  of  holiness.'  .  .  .  This  entire 
construction  of  the  personality  of  Christ  is  accordingly  sketched  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  putting  an  end  to  death  in  the  resurrection.  A  termination  of 
[earthly]  destiny  so  far  surpassing  all  that  is  ordinarily  human  can  be 
grounded  only  in  a  nature  of  the  subject  of  that  destiny  which  likewise  sur- 


THE  PERSON  OF  CHRIST  29 1 

The  declaration  that  Christ  appeared  on  the  earth  in 
"the  Hkeness  of  sinful  flesh  "  may  be  regarded  as  express- 
ing the  doctrine  of  his  entire  humanity.  For  Paul  does 
not  use  the  terra  "  flesh  "  of  the  bodily  nature  only,  but  of 
"the  whole  man,  body  and  soul,  reason,  and  all  his  faculties 
included,  because  all  that  is  in  him  longs  and  strives  after 
the  flesh."  If,  then,  he  was  in  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh, 
and  yet  did  not  know  sin,  it  was  because,  by  the  power  of 
the  Spirit,  the  principle  of  his  ideal,  heavenly  humanity, 
he  either  had  no  sinful  desires,  or,  having  them,  was 
superior  to  their  influence.  Which  of  these  two  alterna- 
tives lay  in  the  mind  of  the  apostle  it  may  be  impossible 
to  determine,  but  it  is  favourable  to  the  former  that  he 
nowhere  represents  Christ  as  subject  to  a  struggle  with 
evil  propensities  and  engaged  in  a  conflict  with  sin.  But 
it  is  difficult  to  reconcile  this  view  of  the  matter  with 
Paul's  doctrine  of  the  effect  of  the  sin  of  the  first  Adam 
upon  his  posterity.  For  he  certainly  believed  that  in  and 
through  this  primal  transgression  sin  and  death  became 
powers  in  human  nature  from  whose  sway  no  man  was 
exempt.  "  Death  passed  unto  all  men  in  that  all  sinned  " 
(Rom.  V,  12).  All  became  mortal  through  Adam's  sin, 
because  Adam's  having  sinned  was,  so  far  as  this  conse- 
quence is  concerned,  a  sinning  of  all,  for  "by  the  trespass 
of  the  one,  the  many  died."  Hence  the  idea  of  a  man 
having  a  nature  in  "the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh"  and  yet 
knowing  no  sin  appears  to  tend  to  the  Docetic  conception 
of  Christ,  that  is,  that  his  body  was  not  a  real  one  of  flesh 

passed  all  that  is  ordinarily  human.  Thereby  was  the  personality  of  the 
Founder  of  Christianity  first  removed  from  the  ranks  of  mankind,  to  which  it 
belonged  in  a  measure  only  half-way,  'according  to  the  flesh,'  in  order  to  sur- 
pass humanity  the  more  decidedly  on  the  side  of  God,  i.e.,  according  to  that 
which  Christ  had  from  God  —  a  first  step,  indeed,  toward  the  Church  doctrine 
of  the  twofold  nature,  but  differently  construed  from  this."  —  Holtzmann, 
Neutest.   TheoL,  ii.  p.  74. 


292  THE    TEACHER 

and  blood  —  a  doctrine  which  has  been  maintained  by 
some  high  authorities  as  that  of  the  apostle.  Yet  that 
this  cannot  have  been  Paul's  idea  is  evident  from  his 
teaching  that  Christ's  descent  was  in  the  natural  order,  he 
being  ''  of  the  seed  of  David  according  to  the  flesh " 
(Rom.  i.  3).  Moreover,  since  there  is  nowhere  in  Paul's 
writings  the  slightest  intimation  that  he  believed  in  the 
supernatural  generation  of  Jesus  according  to  the  story  in 
the  first  and  third  Gospels,  recourse  cannot  be  had  to  this 
doctrine  in  order  to  explain  his  idea  that  Christ  was  only 
in  ''  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh  "  and  without  a  knowledge 
of  sin.  This  difflculty  in  the  Pauline  Christology  is 
similar  to  that  which  attaches  to  the  teaching  of  the 
Jewish  theology,  from  which  its  origin  may  perhaps  be 
traced,  that  though  all  men  have  by  nature  the  impulse  to 
sin,  some  individuals,  the  patriarchs  in  particular,  remained 
sinless.  These,  ho'wever,  were  not  regarded  as  without 
tendencies  to  sin,  and  their  sinlessness  was  conceived  as 
the  result  of  overcoming  them  (see  Weber,  System,  p.  224). 
Perhaps  Rom.  viii.  3  and  2  Cor.  v.  21  may  fairly  be  inter- 
preted according  to  the  analogy  of  this  Jewish  doctrine.* 

Although  "born  of  the  seed  of  David  according  to  the 
flesh,"  this  "last  Adam,"  this  "  man  from  heaven,"  was 
not  conceived  by  Paul  to  have  begun  his  existence  when  he 
began  his  earthly  life.     This  notion  of  the  ideal,  heavenly 

*  "  Before  Paul  there  arose  for  his  Messianic  idea  two  contradictory  require- 
ments: I.  The  Messiah  must  have  been  a  being  xvithout  a  crtD/ia  aapKos  in 
order  to  have  been  without  sin ;  2.  The  Messiah  must  have  been  a  being 
wi^k  a  (rdixa  aapKos  in  order  to  have  been  able  to  die  [as  an  atonement  for 
men].  Paul  satisfied  both  [these  requirements]  by  apprehending  the  two 
required  conditions  as  following  each  other  in  time.  The  Messiah  was  origi- 
nally a  heavenly  being,  and  as  such  a  dvva/JLLS  (an  &v9pu}7ros)  cLaapKos,  and  he 
becomes  in  the  fulness  of  time  an  earthly  being  and  an  &vdponros  '4paapKos 
through  his  appearance  as  the  heavenly  man  x/)tcrT6s,  who,  according  to 
Gen.  i.  26,  was  created  in  the  image  of  God,  in  order  to  die  the  death  of  the 
Messiah."  —  Holsten,  Die  paiiUir.   TheoL,  p.  100. 


THE   PERSON   OF  CHRIST  293 

humanity  of  Christ  which  was  fundamental  in  the  apostle's 
Christology,  bears  so  great  a  similarity  to  certain  specula- 
tions of  the  Jewish  theology  that  its  origin  in  them  is 
highly  probable.  This  theology  ''  found  taught  in  the  first 
and  second  chapters  of  Genesis  a  twofold  creation  of  man, 
that  of  the  heavenly,  spiritual,  and  archetypal  man,  and 
that  of  the  earthly,  sensuous,  and  antitypal  man."  "  In 
part  at  least  it  saw  in  that  first-created,  heavenly  man  the 
Messiah,  who  was  concealed  with  God  prior  to  his  earthly 
appearance."  "Since  Paul  the  theologian,"  remarks  Pflei- 
derer,  from  whom  the  two  preceding  quotations  are  taken, 
"  was  acquainted  with  these  doctrines  of  his  school,  it  were" 
strange  if  he  should  have  constructed  his  so  essentially 
similar  Christology  without  any  reference  to  those  Jewish 
theologumena  by  mere  reflection  upon  his  own  pious  experi- 
ences "  {Der  Paiilinisiniis,  2te  Aufl.,  p.  1 19).  The  preexist- 
ence  of  Christ,  together  with  his  participation  in  the  Old 
Testament  economy,  is  unequivocally  expressed  in  the  dec- 
laration that  in  the  desert  the  Israelites  "  drank  of  the  spir- 
itual rock  that  followed  them;  and  the  rock  was  Christ" 
(i  Cor.  x.  4).  As  the  manna  was  not  a  natural  product, 
but  a  "spiritual  food,"  so  the  miraculous  rock  which  fur- 
nished water  to  the  thirsty  Israelites  vv^as  no  ordinary,  nat- 
ural rock,  but  a  irerpa  TrvevfiaTtKr),  real,  but  of  heavenly 
origin,  because  it  was  the  actual  self-revelation  and  appear- 
ance of  the  invisible  Son  of  God. 

This  idea  is  related  to  that  of  Philo,  who  regarded  the  rock 
as  Wisdom  (crot^ta),  just  as  the  manna  was  to  him  the  Logos. 
The  notion  of  prefiguration  and  type  is  neither  expressed 
nor  intimated  by  the  apostle  in  the  passage,  but  the  people 
are  said  to  have  been  supplied  with  a  "spiritual  drink" 
which  was  furnished  them  by  Christ  in  the  "phenomenal 
form  "  of  the  rock.  Again,  Christ  is  represented  as  having 
entered  into  human  existence  by  an  act  of  his  own  choice, 


294  ^^^    TEACHER 

by  which  he  gave  up  the  riches  of  his  glorious,  preexistent 
state,  and  became  poor  in  order  that  behevers  might 
through  his  poverty  become  rich  (2  Cor.  viii.  9).  Likewise 
it  is  declared  that  Christ,  though  being  in  the  form  of  God 
in  his  heavenly  estate,  "emptied  himself,  taking  the  form 
of  a  servant,"  and  "  was  made  in  the  likeness  of  men."  As 
Spirit,  as  the  heavenly  man,  he  lived  in  godlikeness,  but 
in  order  to  accomplish  his  work  for  men  he  assumed  their 
lowly  condition,  and  became  *' obedient  unto  death"  (Phil, 
ii.  6-Z\  Preexistence  is  plainly  expressed  in  the  words  : 
"God  sent  His  Son  in  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh,"  and 
^'when  the  fulness  of  the  time  came  God  sent  forth  His 
Son,  born  of  a  woman  "  (Rom.  viii.  3  ;  Gal.  iv.  4).  The 
mention  of  his  sending  forth  in  connection  with  emphatic 
reference  to  his  coming  in  the  flesh  and  his  birth  under 
human  conditions  evidently  implies  a  passing  from  one 
state  of  existence  to  another.  These  specifications  as  to 
the  mode  of  earthly  existence  and  the  entrance  upon  it 
would  be  altogether  unnatural,  except  of  one  to  whose  prior 
condition  they  did  not  belong.  "  Such  language  is  appli- 
cable only  to  a  spiritual  being  passing  into  the  conditions 
of  incarnate  life." 

It  is  a  debatable  question  whether  Paul  believed  that 
Christ  in  his  preexistent  state  participated  in  the  creation. 
The  meaning  of  the  passage  in  i  Cor.  viii.  6  is  not  entirely 
clear  :  "  Yet  to  us  there  is  one  God,  the  Father,  of  whom 
are  all  things,  and  we  unto  Him ;  and  one  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  through  whom  are  all  things,  and  we  through  him." 
Without  doubt  the  Jewish  monotheism,  the  doctrine  of  the 
absolute  supremacy  of  God  as  the  first  cause,  is  here  main- 
tained intact  in  the  words  e'f  ov  ra  iravra,  "of  whom  are  all 
things."  Only  with  reference  to  the  interpretation  of  ht 
ov  ra  Trdvra,  "  through  whom  are  all  things,"  is  there  any 
uncertainty.     Yet  there  can  be  no  good  reason  for  regard- 


THE  PERSON   OF  CHRIST  295 

ing  the  tcl  iravra  of  the  second  clause  as  either  including 
less  than  the  same  words  in  the  former  clause,  or  as  refer- 
ring to  something  different  as  being  "  through "  Christ 
from  that  which  in  the  first  instance  is  declared  to  be  ''of" 
God  as  primary  cause.  "  All  things  "  are  said  to  be  of 
God  as  the  original  ground  of  existence,  and  "we  to  Him" 
as  the  one  whose  purposes  the  Christians  were  intended  to 
serve  as  the  ethical  end  of  their  being.  It  is  the  Lord 
Christ,  however,  through  whom  all  things  are,  and  we 
through  him,  to  whom  our  spiritual  new  creation  as  believ- 
ers is  due.  A  clear  distinction  is  thus  drawn  between  ''all 
things  "  as  the  totality  of  creation  and  the  Christians  as 
the  special  discriminated  from  the  general.  It  is  extremely 
arbitrary  to  assume,  as  Kostlin  does,  that  hi  ov  in  the  sec- 
ond clause  is  so  "indefinite  "  that  any  other  verb  than  the 
iyevero,  which  is  clearly  to  be  understood  in  the  first  clause, 
may  be  substituted  in  the  second,  so  that  we  may  suppose 
"live,"  "are  governed,"  or  "are  sustained,"  to  be  in- 
tended. While  Rom.  xi.  36  lends  some  support  to  this 
interpretation,  since  81  ov  is  there  employed  of  the  sustain- 
ing and  governing  activity  of  God  between  the  origin  and 
the  consummation  of  the  world,  the  relation  of  the  two 
clauses  in  the  passage  in  question  renders  it  most  natural 
at  least  if  not  necessary  to  supply  in  the  second  the  verb 
which  is  implied  in  the  first.  Thus  Christ  is  regarded  as 
the  mediate  cause  of  the  creation,  which  was  immedi- 
ately effected  by  the  "one  God"  as  its  primary  ground  and 
source.  The  fact  that  Paul  regarded  Christ  as  himself  a 
created  being  ("  the  last  Adam  became  [was  created]  a  life- 
giving  Spirit,"  I  Cor.  xv.  45)  cannot  be  urged  against  this 
interpretation.  For,  as  Pfleiderer  has  pointed  out,  the 
thought  of  the  Jewish  theologians  did  not  exclude  the  con- 
ception that  a  creature  of  God  might  be  the  secondary 
cause  or  agent  of  the  creation,  as  is  apparent  in  the  case  of 
Wisdom  in  Prov.  viii.  22  f. 


296  THE    TEACHER 

It  is  interesting  to  note  in  this  connection  that  Philo 
regarded  the  Logos  as  the  organ  of  creation  {op^avov  Be  ov 
KaTaa/cevdadrj  [6  fcoa/jLO^;]),  although  Paul's  relation  to  Philo's 
thought  is  not  determinable.  It  was,  however,  as  the  Son 
of  God,  **  the  man  from  heaven,"  who  shared  the  divine 
"glory"  as  ''the  image  of  God,"  and  not  as  the  divine 
Logos  of  the  Johannine  speculation,  that  Paul  thought  of 
Christ  in  reference  to  his  participation  in  the  creation. 
Accordingly,  he  does  not  employ  the  specific  terms  of  the 
fourth  Gospel  in  which  it  is  said  that  the  Logos  "  was  God," 
and  that  "the  world  was- made  by  him."  The  Pauline  doc- 
trine of  the  person  of  Christ  represents  an  early  stage  of 
the  development  of  New  Testament  Christology  which 
reaches  its  culmination  in  the  conception  of  the  Logos. 
Pfleiderer  has  suggestively  conjectured  that  although  it 
cannot  be  determined  whether  the  Jewish  theology  of  the 
time  of  Paul  ascribed  to  the  Messiah  a  participation  in  the 
work  of  creation,  "it  is  not  unthinkable  that  a  combination 
of  the  sayings  concerning  the  divine  Wisdom  and  the  pre- 
existent  Messiah  may  have  taken  place  in  the  circles  of  the 
Jewish  school  before  the  time  of  Paul ;  whereby  the  doc- 
trine of  the  apostle  as  to  the  mediate  activity  of  Christ  in 
the  creation  would  be  the  more  explicable." 

The  question  whether  Paul  attributed  a  divine  nature  to 
Christ  is  regarded  by  some  commentators  as  settled  in  the 
affirmative  by  Rom.  ix.  5  :  "  And  of  whom  is  Christ  as 
concerning  the  flesh,  who  is  over  all,  God  blessed  forever" 
(Revised  Version),  or,  "  From  whom  as  to  the  flesh  was 
Christ:  He  who  is  over  all,  God,  be  blessed  forever!" 
(Noyes).  The  words  6  obv  enrl  irdvTcov  6eo^  euXoyrjro^;  are 
capable  of  either  rendering,  so  far  as  construction  is  con- 
cerned, and  their  interpretation  depends  upon  the  placing 
of  a  full  stop  or  a  comma  at  the  end  of  the  first  clause. 
If,  with  Tischendorf,  the  full  stop  be  employed,  the  words 


THE  PERSON  OF  CHRIST  207 

in  question  are  an  ascription  of  praise  to  God,  or  a  doxol- 
ogy,  of  which  other  examples  are  found  in  Paul's  Epistles 
(Rom.  i.  25;  2  Cor.  xi.  31).  It  must  be  regarded  as  a 
strong  presumption  against  the  former  interpretation  that 
Paul  everywhere  maintains  the  Jewish  monotheism  in  its 
strictest  sense.  The  absolute  aloneness  of  God  is  a  funda- 
mental principle  in  his  theology.  As  to  Christ's  relation 
to  God,  he  implies  and  afifirms  so  constantly  the  doctrine  of 
the  Son's  subordination  that  it  may  be  said  to  be  the  under- 
lying presumption  of  his  Christology ;  and  since  nowhere 
else  in  all  his  indisputable  Epistles  has  he  written  anything 
that  can  be  construed  into  an  ascription  of  a  divine  nature 
to  him,  it  is  only  by  a  violent  interpretation  that  these 
words  can  be  so  understood. 

The  argument  presented  by  Dr.  Stevens  {The  Pauline 
Theology,  p.  202)  that  as  applied  to  Christ  the  words  form 
a  natural  antithesis  to  to  Kara  adp/ca,  is  of  weight  only  if  it 
can  be  shown  that  an  antithesis  can  be  regarded  as  required 
or  even  expected  in  this  connection.  The  same  scholar's 
appeal  to  Colossians  for  the  ascription  to  Christ  of  ''lofty 
attributes  and  prerogatives  of  creation  and  sovereignty  over 
the  world,"  cannot  be  admitted  in  view  of  the  doubtful  gen- 
uineness of  this  Epistle.  The  fact,  indeed,  that  the  deu- 
tero-Pauline  writings  contain  a  more  developed  Christology 
than  that  of  the  undisputed  Epistles  of  Paul  is  one  of  the 
reasons  for  discrediting  them.  The  passage  in  the  Epistle 
to  Titus  (ii.  13)  cannot  fairly  be  brought  into  the  argument 
in  the  present  state  of  the  criticism  of  the  Pauline  writings. 
The  interpretation  based  upon  the  insertion  of  a  full  pause 
corresponds  with  the  general  tendency  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment writers  to  draw  a  delicate  line  of  distinction  between 
the  absolute  God  and  Christ.  This  is  true  even  of  those 
who  represent  the  most  developed  Christology,  and  assign 
to  the  Son  a  far  higher  rank  than  he  has  in  the  Pauline 


298  THE    TEACHER 

thought.  Moreover,  it  is  in  the  highest  degree  improbable 
that  Paul,  who  calls  Christ  "the  second  man,  the  Lord  from 
heaven,"  ''the  last  Adam,"  and  "the  man  Christ  Jesus," 
could  have  intended  to  designate  him  as  "  God  blessed  for- 
ever." Baur's  words  are  worthy  of  consideration  in  this 
connection,  that  "The  passage  rightly  apprehended  proves 
exactly  the  opposite  of  that  which  is  generally  found  in  it 
—  how  much  it  lay  outside  the  apostle's  circle  of  ideas  to 
put  Christ  on  an  equality  with  God,  and  to  call  him  God  " 
(Paultis,  2te  Aufl.  ii.  p.  264).* 

Another  view  of  this  subject  deserving  of  notice  is  based 
upon  the  apostle's  use  of  the  term  "God,"  which  among  the 
ancients  was  not  always  employed  as  rigidly  as  it  is  by  us. 
Assuming  on  the  ground  of  Paul's  usage  a  certain  flexibility 
of  the  designation  in  this  passage,  the  interpretation  which 
does  not  admit  the  full  stop,  and  assigns  the  disputed 
words  to  Christ,  might  be  allowed.  In  i  Cor.  viii.  5,  the 
apostle  concedes  that  the  heathen  are  not  irrational  in 
assuming  the  existence  of  their  divinities,  since  "there  are 
gods  many  and  lords  many."  These  gods  and  lords  are, 
indeed,  subordinated  to  the  Supreme  Deity,  and  regarded 
doubtless  as  created  beings,  but  they  are  recognised  as 
superhuman  powers,  as  in  Deut  x.  17  it  is  declared,  "The 
Lord  your  God  is  God  of  gods  and  Lord  of  lords."  An 
employment  of  the  term  which  denotes  a  marked  departure 
from  strict  usage  is  found  in  2  Cor.  iv.  4,  where  Paul  calls 
Satan  "the  god  of  this  world"  (alcjvo^;).  The  two  terms, 
god  and  lord,  are  probably  essentially  synonymous  in  these 
passages,  and  designate  beings  holding  a  position  of  do- 
minion and  power  which  may  be  regarded  as  godlike.     If, 

*  An  exhaustive  exegetical  discussion  of  the  passage  in  question  may  be 
found  in  the  Journal  of  the  Society  for  Biblical  Literature  and  Exegesis  for 
1 88 1.  It  is  from  the  pens  of  Dr.  Ezra  Abbot  and  Dr.  Timothy  Dwight.  Dr. 
Abbot's  paper  has  been  reprinted  in  his  Critical  Essays. 


THE  PERSON   OF  CHRIST  299 

now,  even  in  the  Johannine  theology  the  Logos  was  called 
god  without  a  conscious  impairment  in  the  writer's  mind 
of  the  traditional  monotheism,  it  is  not  impossible  that 
Paul,  who  assigned  to  Christ  a  rank  as  ''the  man  from 
heaven"  and  ''the  image  of  God"  in  a  preeminent  sense, 
may  have  designated  him  as  god  without  intending  to 
place  him  on  equality  with  the  Supreme  Deity  either  as  to 
nature  or  functions,  precisely  as  in  Rom.  x.  12,  he  says  of 
him,  "The  same  Lord  is  Lord  of  all."  Accordingly, 
whether  this  interpretation  or  that  supported  in  the  pre- 
ceding paragraph  be  accepted,  the  passage  in  question  is 
found  to  be  in  accord  with  the  general  Pauline  doctrine  of 
the  subordination  of  Christ  to  God,  and  it  cannot  be  re- 
garded as  having  the  importance  which  has  usually  been 
attached  to  it  in  opposition  to  the  assignment  of  the  Paul- 
ine Christology  to  its  proper  place  in  the  development  of 
theology  in  the  New  Testament.  It  goes,  then,  without 
saying  that  the  Trinitarian  dogma  has  no  standing  in  the 
thought  of  the  apostle.* 

We  have  seen  that  the  glorious  existence  and  celestial 
rank  of  Christ  as  the  archetypal,  heavenly  man  prior  to  his 
appearance  in  the  flesh  are  fundamental  tenets  of  the 
apostle's  Christology.  His  essential  preeminence  belonged 
to  him  by  virtue  of  his  creation  as  "the  last  Adam."  In  a 
unique  and  exceptional  sense  he  was  the  Son  of  God,  and 

*  "  As  little  as  one  can  speak  of  a  personal  difference  [in  the  thought  of 
Paul]  of  the  Spirit  from  God  or  Christ,  so  little  can  Christ  coincide  with  God. 
His  *  divinity '  would  directly  exclude  the  idea  that  he  is  originally  '  the 
man  from  heaven,'  who,  in  his  historical  appearance,  is  called  quite  simply 
*man'  (Rom.  v.  15;  I  Cor.  xv.  21).  Just  as  little,  too,  do  such  formulas  as 
'  divine  nature,'  '  God-man,'  '  incarnation,'  express  the  Pauline  doctrine  with 
any  precision.  This  knows  only  of  a  man  with  a  divine  content  of  life  upon 
the  earth,  and  in  consequence  thereof  also  with  a  spiritual  form  of  exist- 
ence above  the  earth  in  the  sphere  of  God."  —  Holtzmann,  Neutest,  TkeoL,  ii. 
p.  94. 


300  THE    TEACHER 

as  such  was  **  sent "  into  the  world  (Rom.  viii.  3  ;  Gal. 
iv.  4).  Yet  there  are  some  passages  which  appear  to  in- 
dicate that  his  exalted  rank  was  accorded  on  account  of  his 
devotion  to  the  service  of  man,  and  in  particular  because 
of  his  death  and  resurrection.  In  Rom.  i.  3  it  is  said  that 
Christ  was  ''  born  of  the  seed  of  David  according  to  the 
flesh,"  and  "declared  [appointed,  determined]  to  be  the  Son 
of  God  according  to  the  Spirit  of  holiness  by  the  resurrec- 
tion of  the  dead.''  This  passage  is  brought  into  conflict 
with  explicit  declarations  of  Paul's  if  it  is  interpreted 
to  teach  that  Christ's  divine  sonship  was  originally  and 
essentially  determined  by  his  resurrection.  The  apos- 
tle's thought  probably  was  that  through  the  resurrection 
Christ  was  declared  to  the  faith  of  men  to  be  what  in  his 
existence  KaTa  acip/ca  he  did  not  appear  to  be,  that  is,  the 
Son  of  God.  But  that  the  rank  which  was  "declared" 
(6pLcr6m)  to  belong  to  him  was  always  essentially  his  is 
indicated  by  the  declaration  that  his  divine  sonship  cor- 
responded to  the  fact  that  he  possessed  "the  Spirit  of 
holiness."  This  peculiar  expression  is  evidently  chosen  in 
order  to  denote  the  belief  that  as  belonging  originally  to 
Christ  the  endowment  included  more  than  can  pertain  to 
any  earthly  man,  and  distinguished  its  possessor  preemi- 
nently as  a  participant  in  the  heavenly  divine  life.  For 
this  "Spirit  of  holiness"  which  constituted  the  personality 
of  Christ  must  be  regarded  as  of  celestial  origin.  Accord- 
ingly, he  was  able  to  be  to  believers  a  "life-giving  Spirit." 
By  a  transference  of  the  Messiah-idea  of  the  Jewish  theol- 
ogy to  Christ  he  was  regarded  as  the  preexistent,  heavenly 
man  who  in  distinction  from  men  of  earthly  mould  pos- 
sessed as  essential  qualities  of  his  being  "the  Spirit  of 
holiness  "  and  the  Spirit  of  life  which  qualified  him  to  be 
the  head  of  a  new,  regenerated  humanity. 
The  exaltation  of  Christ  which  Paul  believed  to  be  ac- 


THE   PERSON   OF  CHRIST  3OI 

corded  to  him  on  account  of  his  death  and  through  his 
resurrection  doubtless  includes  an  increment  of  functions 
rather  than  an  increase  of  essential  dignity  and  rank  of 
nature.  By  reason  of  these  two  events  of  his  earthly  fort- 
une, which  to  Paul  were  of  central  and  paramount  signifi- 
cance, he  attained  the  rank  of  lordship,  a  godlike  position 
of  dominion.*  Accordingly,  in  Rom.  xiv.  9,  the  apostle 
declares:  "For  to  this  end  Christ  died  and  lived  again, 
that  he  might  be  Lord  both  of  the  dead  and  the  living." 
A  similar  conception  is  expressed  in  Phil.  ii.  9  f .  :  "  Where- 
fore [because  of  his  humiliation],  also,  God  highly  exalted 
him,  and  gave  unto  him  the  name  which  is  above  every 
name ;  that  in  the  name  of  Jesus  every  knee  should  bow, 
of  things  in  heaven  and  things  on  earth  and  things  under 
the  earth,  and  that  every  tongue  should  confess  that  Jesus 
Christ  is  Lord  to  the  glory  of  God  the  Father."  In  this 
bowing  of  the  knee  is  expressed  the  declaration  that  to  the 
exalted  Lord  Christ  is  due  the  worship  not  only  of  angelic 
beings  and  spirits  m  sheol  in  accordance  with  the  popular 
mythology  but  also  of  all  living  men.  Since,  however,  this 
worship  is  "to  the  glory  of  God  the  Father,"  no  prejudice 
to  the  monotheistic  doctrine  is  implied.  Christ  is  Lord  of 
the  heavenly  spirits  and  of  all  the  living  and  the  dead. 
Believers  belono;  to  him  whether  in  life  or  death,  to  him 


*  (( 


He,  who  through  the  resurrection  is  exalted  above  all  earthly  limitation 
and  weakness,  has  thereby  become  that  for  which  he  was  already  designed, 
during  and  before  his  earthly  existence,  by  reason  of  the  Spirit  of  holiness  that 
dwelt  in  him  as  a  principle  forming  his  personality."  "  In  truth,  Christ  had  in 
the  flesh,  according  to  Phil.  ii.  6-8,  exchanged  '  the  form  of  God '  (/xo/x^t;  ^eoC), 
which  in  any  case  must  be  thought  as  radiant  with  glory  (ev  §6^7?  in  the  sense 
of  2  Cor.  iii.  7,  8,  il),  for  the  'form  of  a  servant'  (mo/30^  ho<j\ov),  and  re- 
nounced every  divine  mode  of  manifestation  as  incompatible  with  the  flesh. 
But  after  the  hitherto  latent  irvev\ia  became  free  and  potent  with  the  resurrec- 
tion, the  glory  of  God  shines  in  its  highest  and  purest  form  constantly  ...  in 
his  face,  as  is  fitting  to  the  'image  of  God'  {eiKi^v  rov  ^eoO)."  —  Holtzmann, 
Neutest,  Theol,  ii.  pp.  78,  81. 


302  THE    TEACHER 

are  due  their  allegiance  and  adoration,  and  in  him  is  their 
hope. 

The  idea  of  his  descent  to  the  underworld  is  not,  how- 
ever, necessarily  implied  here,  as  Meyer  maintains.  It 
accords  with  this  sentiment  of  worship  toward  a  being  of 
exalted  rank  and  authority  that  the  term  '*  Lord,"  which  in 
the  Septuagint  is  a  designation  of  Yahweh,  is  frequently 
applied  to  Christ.  The  salvation  of  men  is  declared  to 
depend  upon  confession  to  him  as  Lord  (Rom.  x.  9).  Yet, 
while  he  is  represented  as  sitting  at  the  right  hand  of  God, 
that  is,  as  a  participator  in  the  divine  government,  his 
subordination  to  the  Father  is  implied  in  his  office  as  an 
intercessor  for  the  believers  (Rom.  viii.  33,  "who  also 
maketh  intercession  for  us  ").  In  accordance  with  a  con- 
ception of  the  Messiah  not  unknown  to  Judaism  (Enoch- 
Parables,  xlv.  li.  Ixix.),  the  function  of  judge  of  men  is 
ascribed  to  Christ,  which  he  would  exercise  at  the  consum- 
mation of  the  existing  world-order,  when  "the  Lord  himself 
shall  descend  from  heaven  with  a  shout,  with  the  voice  of 
the  archangel,  and  with  the  trump  of  God"  (i  Thess.  iv. 
16),  and  when  "the  dead  shall  be  raised  incorruptible,  and 
we  [the  living  believers]  shall  be  changed"  (i  Cor.  xv.  51). 
Accordingly,  Paul  enjoins  upon  the  Corinthians  that  they 
"judge  nothing  before  the  time,  until  the  Lord  come,  who 
will  bring  to  light  the  hidden  things  of  darkness,  and  make 
manifest  the  counsels  of  the  hearts"  (i  Cor.  iv.  5),  and 
declares  that  "we  must  all  be  made  manifest  before  the 
judgment-seat  of  Christ,  that  each  may  receive  the  things 
done  in  the  body,  according  to  what  he  hath  done,  whether 
it  be  good  or  bad"  (2  Cor.  v.  10).  The  "glory"  in  which 
the  apostle  conceived  Christ  to  exist  after  his  resurrection 
and  exaltation  to  the  right  hand  of  God  is  doubtless  that  in 
which  he  believed  him  to  have  preexisted  when,  "  being  in 
the  form  of  God,  he  counted  it  not  a  prize  [dpirayfjiov,  a 


THE  PERSON  OF   CHRIST  303 

thing  to  be  eagerly  grasped  after]  to  be  on  equality  with 
God"  (Phil.  ii.  6).  By  "form"  (/^o/jc^t;)  is  without  doubt 
meant  the  mode  of  existence  of  the  Deity  and  the  heavenly 
beings  generally  which,  as  before  remarked,  Paul  conceived 
to  be  that  of  a  luminous  splendour  or  "glory"  (compare  the 
"great  light"  in  the  account  of  Paul's  conversion,  Acts 
xxii.  6),  and  in  which  consisted  the  riches  of  Christ  that 
were  renounced  when  he  "emptied  himself,"  and  assumed 
the  position  of  a  "servant"  in  order  to  accomplish  his 
earthly  mission.  This  godlike  mode  of  existence  {ro  elvai 
Ida  6e(p)  he  did  not  count  a  prize,  but  having  voluntarily 
renounced  it  for  a  life  of  sacrifice,  he  attained  it  as  a 
reward  for  his  humiliation  and  service.  Hence  his  Lord- 
ship and  "the  name  which  is  above  every  name."  That 
the  existence  of  Christ  in  the  "image"  or  "form  "  of  God 
was  not,  however,  conceived  by  Paul  as  incompatible  with 
his  archetypal  humanity  is  evident  from  i  Cor.  xi.  7  already 
referred  to,  where  man  is  said  to  be  "the  image  and  glory 
of  God  "  ;  from  Rom.  viii.  29,  "  whom  He  foreknew  He  also 
foreordained  to  be  conformed  to  the  image  of  His  Son  "  ; 
and  from  Phil.  iii.  21,  "who  shall  fashion  anew  the  body  of 
our  humiliation,  that  it  may  be  conformed  to  the  body  of 
his  glory,  according  to  the  working  whereby  he  is  able  even 
to  subject  all  things  unto  himself." 

The  importance  of  the  doctrine  of  the  preexistence  of 
Christ  in  the  Pauline  Christology  is  apparent  when  we 
consider  the  apostle's  teaching  regarding  the  incarnation. 
For  the  most  conspicuous  feature  of  this  teaching  is  the 
conception  of  a  voluntary  self-devotion  of  an  exalted  being 
who  out  of  love  for  man  left  his  high  estate  in  the  heavenly 
regions,  and  descended  to  participate  in  the  lowly  fortunes 
of  earthly  men  for  their  redemption.  This  idea  denotes  a 
marked  departure  ot  Paul  from  the  current  Jewish  Mes- 
sianism,  according  to  which  the  Messiah  was  concealed  in 


304  THE    TEACHER 

the  heavens  awaiting  the  time  of  his  manifestation.*  The 
Messiah  whom  Judaism  was  awaiting,  Paul  recognised  in 
Jesus  of  Nazareth.  He  whom  his  Jewish  contemporaries 
expected  to  see  come  in  pomp  and  power  for  the  overthrow 
of  their  enemies,  Paul  saw  already  manifested  in  a  mission 
of  loving  sacrifice  undertaken  in  order  to  effect  the  right- 
eousness which  should  prepare  for  his  final  coming  as 
judge  in  the  great  consummation  of  the  age.  "  This  new 
feature  [the  love  manifested  in  the  incarnation],  which  the 
apostle  added  to  the  traditional  Messiah  of  his  school,  was 
the  fruit  of  the  ethical  impression  that  the  crucified  Jesus 
had  made  upon  his  mind,  and  it  betrays  itself  precisely  in 
this,  that  this  impression  was  at  bottom  the  decisive  motive 
for  his  faith  in  the  Messiahship  of  him  who  died  upon  the 
cross  "  (Pfleiderer,  itt  siiprd). 

A  barren  idea  of  the  Jewish  theological  speculation,  that 
of  the  "concealed,"  preexistent  Messiah,  was  transformed 
by  the  apostle  into  a  great  ethical  and  spiritual  doctrine  in 
which  he  found  the  hope  of  his  own  deliverance  and  of  that 
of  all  who  should  believe  on  the  crucified  one  from  bondage 
to  the  law  into  **  the  glorious  liberty  of  the  children  of 
God  "  (Rom.  viii.  21).  The  incarnation  of  Christ  was  not, 
however,  in  the  thought  of  the  apostle  that  of  the  second 
person  of  a  divine  trinity.  There  is  no  ground  for  suppos- 
ing that  he  so  far  departed  from  the  current  Messianism 
as  to  think  of  the  Messiah  as  such  in  other  terms  than 
those  of  the  popular  theology  according  to  which  the  ex- 
pected one  was  a  preexistent  heavenly  man.  Accordingly, 
he  conceived  the  incarnation  as  the  passage  of  "  the  man 
from  heaven  "  into  human  conditions,  as  his  abandonment 
through  self-sacrificing  love  of  his  condition  of  ''glory" 
and  godlikeness  and  the  assumption  of  a  body  conformed 

♦See  Weizsacker,  Das  apostol.  Zeiialter,  2te  Aufl.  p.  125,  and  Pfleiderer, 
Paulinismus,  2te  Aufl.  p.  123. 


THE  PERSON   OE  CHRIST  305 

to  the  earthly,  sensuous  organisms  of  men,  or  "in  the  Uke- 
ness  of  sinful  flesh."  From  this  point  of  view  is  apparent 
the  injustice  to  the  thought  of  the  apostle  which  is  done 
by  the  bold  rationalism  that  interprets  his  conception  of 
the  preexistence  of  Christ  as  ideal  or  existing  only  in  the 
mind  of  God.  This  view  renders  Christ  a  mere  instrument 
of  the  purposes  of  God,  and  robs  his  work  of  self-devotion, 
of  the  voluntary,  ethical  element  which  was  fundamental  in 
Paul's  thought  of  the  redemption  effected  on  the  cross. 
Moreover,  the  terms  employed  by  Paul  relative  to  Christ's 
coming  in  the  flesh  can  only  by  the  most  violent  exegesis 
be  regarded  as  applicable  to  an  ideal  being  or  a  principle 
existing  in  the  divine  purpose,  when  we  consider  how  they 
must  have  been  understood  by  his  readers.  Only  of  an 
existing  personality  can  it  be  said  that  he  was  rich,  and 
became  poor;  that  he  was  ''in  the  form  of  God,"  and 
assumed  that  of  a  servant ;  that  after  his  humiliation  he 
was  exalted,  and  that  he  was  "born  of  a  woman"  and 
*'  under  the  law." 

Professor  Beyschlag  has  undertaken  to  explain  away  a 
real  incarnation  as  pertaining  to  the  Pauline  Christology 
by  reasoning  that  the  heavenly  man  could  not  be  thought 
by  the  apostle  to  have  preexisted  along  with  the  Father 
without  the  ascription  to  him  in  his  preexistence  of  all  that 
belongs  to  the  real  man,  that  is,  spirit  and  flesh,  and  assum- 
ing in  that  state  a  development  resting  upon  these.  Since 
this  supposition  is  absurd  and  cannot  be  attributed  to  the 
apostle,  it  is  concluded  that  he  conceived  of  the  preexist- 
ence of  the  heavenly  man  as  ideal.  But  this  position  has 
been  shown  to  be  entirely  untenable,  since  Paul  speaks  of 
''  celestial "  and  ''  spiritual  "  bodies,  and  declares  that  "flesh 
and  blood  cannot  inherit  the  kingdom  of  God"  (i  Cor.  xv. 
50).  An  existence  purely  spiritual  and  independent  of  the 
flesh  could   not  have  presented  any  difficulty  to  one  who 


306  THE    TEACHER 

wrote  of  being  absent  from  the  body  and  at  home  with  the 
Lord  (2  Cor.  v.  8)  and  of  the  fashioning  anew  of  the  body 
of  our  humiliation  into  conformity  with  Christ's  body  of 
glory  (Phil.  iii.  21).  ''One  cannot  in  fact  oppose  more 
fundamentally  Paul's  entire  mode  of  thought  and  that  of  his 
age  than  by  attributing  to  him  the  opinion  that  the  sub- 
sistence of  the  personality  depends  on  the  sarkical  exist- 
ence "  (Pfleiderer,  ///  supra,  p.  126).  The  conception,  then, 
of  a  real  incarnation  of  Christ  by  an  entrance  upon  bodily 
conditions  out  of  a  preexistent  state  of  pure  spirituality  can 
be  offensive  only  to  those  interpreters  of  Paul  who  will  at 
all  hazards  bring  his  thought  into  accord  with  certain  mod- 
ern ideas  by  stripping  it  of  its  mystic  and  supernatural  feat- 
ures. It  is  evident  from  the  foregoing  considerations  that 
the  ''nerve"  of  the  Pauline  teaching  as  to  the  incarnation 
consists  in  "  the  identity  of  the  heavenly  Christ  and  the 
earthly  Jesus." 

The  person  of  Christ  was,  however,  in  the  Pauline  doc- 
trine so  intimately  connected  with  Christianity  as  a  prin- 
ciple of  a  new  world-order  of  life  that  the  two  cannot  be 
adequately  considered  apart.  To  the  apostle,  Christ  as  a 
person  and  Clirist  as  a  spiritual  principle  of  cosmic  signifi- 
cance are  identical.  Two  orders  of  existence  are  constantly 
before  his  mind,  and  the  shadows  of  the  one  are  mingled 
with  the  light  of  the  other  in  many  of  the  most  impressive 
expressions  of  his  thought.  On  the  one  hand  is  the  fleshly 
nature  of  man,  in  which  sin  and  death  are  provided  for  as 
an  inevitable  result,  though  death  is  represented  as  the 
penalty  of  transgression,  —  an  antinomy  which  does  not, 
perhaps,  admit  of  reconciliation.  At  the  head  of  this  order 
stands  the  fleshly  progenitor  of  the  race  "through"  whom 
"  sin  entered  into  the  world,  and  death  through  sin,  and  so 
death  passed  unto  all,  for  that  all  sinned"  (Rom.  v.  13,  14). 
Here  are  those  who  sin  under  the  law  which,  though  "holy, 


THE   PERSON  OF  CHRIST  307 

just,  and  good,"  is  only  an  occasion  of  transgression,  and 
has  no  saving  efficacy.  It  "entered,"  indeed,  "that  the 
offence  might  abound,"  and  apart  from  it  "sin  is  dead." 
There  is  no  hope  in  themselves  alone  for  those  who  are 
chained  to  "this  body  of  death."  With  their  best  en- 
deavour, they  can  scarcely  do  more  than  bring  forth  the 
horrid  spiritual  brood  of  "the  works  of  the  flesh."  Here, 
too,  are  those  who  sin  without  the  law,  the  gentiles,  against 
whom  "the  wrath  of  God  is  revealed  from  heaven,"  who 
are  given  up  "in  the  lusts  of  their  hearts  unto  unclean- 
liness,"  and  the  catalogue  of  whose  manifold  depravities 
and  abominations  casts  a  terrible  shadow  upon  the  opening 
pages  of  the  greatest  of  the  Epistles. 

Over  against  this  gloomy  world-order  of  sin  and  death 
the  apostle  places  the  new  world-order  of  regeneration  and 
life,  Christianity  and  Christ  conceived  together  as  a  princi- 
ple of  redemption  and  spiritual  transformation.  At  the 
head  of  this  order  of  life  stands  "  the  man  from  heaven," 
"the  last  Adam,"  who  was  made  a  "quickening  Spirit." 
Through  him  are  to  be  done  away  the  baneful  evils  of  the 
former  order  of  things  for  as  many  as  shall  believe  in  him. 
"The  man  Christ  Jesus,"  who  had  been  revealed  in  Paul  at 
his  conversion,  was  the  resurrected  Lord  of  glory,  and  in 
his  resurrection  the  apostle  saw  the  hope  of  the  victory 
over  death  for  all  in  whom  the  Spirit  should  dwell.  He 
was  not  thinking  of  the  end  of  physical  death,  but  of  the 
taking  away  of  the  "sting  of  death,"  which  is  sin,  through 
him  who  had  destroyed  it  by  his  propitiation.  It  was  the 
sting  of  death  that  the  departed,  who  had  no  hold  upon  life 
because  without  spiritual  connection  with  Christ,  could 
have  no  resurrection,  but  must  remain  in  the  shadowy  life 
of  the  underworld,  when  the  Lord  should  presently  descend 
in  glory.  Accordingly,  he  declares  that  if  Christ  be  not 
risen  the  faith  of  the  believers  is  vain,  and  they  are  yet  in 


3o8  THE    TEACHER 

their  sins.     If  in  this  life  only  they  have  hoped  in  Christ, 
they  are  of  all  men  most  miserable  (i  Cor.  xv.  19). 

It  does  not  belong  to  the  scope  of  this  chapter  to  discuss 
the  method  according  to  which  the  powers  of  this  new 
world-order  were  conceived  to  operate  and  to  determine 
how  the  Christ-principle  of  life  was  believed  to  be  effica- 
cious in  neutralising  the  Adamic  principle  of  death.  Suf- 
fice it  to  say  that  in  the  Christology  of  the  great  apostle 
the  dethronement  of  Death  and  the  crowning  of  Life  were 
not  thought  to  be  effected  by  natural  processes.  "  The 
sting  of  death  "  was  not  taken  away,  the  deliverance  of 
souls  from  the  realm  of  sheol  was  not  consummated  by  the 
ethical  influence  of  a  man  who  was  on  a  level  with  all  others 
except  by  reason  of  preeminent  spirituality.  So  tame  a  con- 
ception could  have  had  no  place  in  the  mystical  thought  of 
Paul.  The  great  transformation  was  effected  by  a  super- 
natural being  from  the  upper  realm.  It  was  the  heavenly 
man,  the  life-giving  Spirit,  whom  death  could  not  hold, 
who  not  only  gave  by  his  resurrection  evidence  of  the 
resurrection  of  those  who  should  enter  into  spiritual  union 
with  him,  but  became  "  the  first  fruits  of  them  that  slept," 
and  the  head  of  the  new  humanity,  reconstituted  and  vital- 
ised by  a  celestial  principle  which  should  transform  the 
mortal  body  into  the  "glory"  of  which  his  heavenly  body 
was  the  type.  The  two  world-periods,  that  of  the  reign  of 
death  represented  by  Adam  and  that  in  which  the  princi- 
ple of  life  predominated,  at  the  head  of  which  was  Christ, 
were  not  conceived  by  Paul  as  absolutely  opposed  in  their 
fundamental  character,  but  as  having  a  bond  of  union  in 
the  fact  that  they  were  human  dispensations,  since  the  chief 
of  each  was  a  man.  All  men  die  in  the  earthy  man,  Adam, 
because  according  to  the  flesh  they  partake  of  his  nature; 
and  all  may  "be  made  alive"  in  the  heavenly  man,  Christ, 
because  spiritually  they  may  partake  of  his.     The  principle 


THE   PERSON   OF  CHRIST 


309 


which  he  represented  could  be  realised  in  humanity  only 
because  he  partook  of  the  nature  of  man,*  and  as  the  spir- 
itual archetype  of  the  race  was  fitted  to  become  the  head  of 
a  new  order  of  human  life.  Only  as  man  could  he  have 
been  the  ''first  fruits"  of  those  who  slept  the  sleep  of 
death,  and  have  furnished  believers  with  that  ''hope  in 
Christ"  for  the  life  to  come  without  which  they  were  "of 
all  men  most  miserable." 

The  Pauline  teaching  of  the  person  of  Christ  thus  pre- 
sents an  important  phase  of  the  development  of  Christo- 
logical  conceptions  apparent  in  the  New  Testament.  It 
stands  in  marked  contrast  with  the  Christology  of  the 
Petrine  gospel,  which  saw  in  Jesus  the  Jewish  Messiah 
whose  mission  had  been  interrupted  by  death,  "  whom  the 
heavens  must  receive  until  the  time  of  the  restoration  of 
all  things  vv^hereof  God  spake  by  the  mouth  of  His  holy 
prophets,"  and  who  was  to  set  up  at  his  coming  his  own 
"throne"  of  judgment  upon  the  "nations"  and  twelve 
thrones  for  his  twelve  apostles.  The  coiiception  which 
Paul  set  over  against  this  was  that  of  Christ  as  no  national 
Messiah  merely,  but  as  the  man  from  heaven,  the  spiritual 
representative  of  the  human  race  which  having  gone  down 
in  death  through  the  first  Adam  might  through  the  last 
Adam  be  raised  to  life  and  immortality.  Men  may  differ 
as  to  whether  or  no  the  apostle  had  any  historical  or  rational 
grounds  for  this  doctrine,  but  no  one  can  "deny  the  gran- 
deur of  its  main  conception  or  the  depth  of  insight  and  pure 
passion  of  aspiration  with  which  when  once  free  from  the 
tangle  of  its  dialectics  it  rushes  upon  its  sublime  conclu- 
sions."    It  occupies  an  intermediate  position  between  the 

*  Biedermann's  discrimination  may  well  be  noted  in  this  connection  :  "  His 
ego  was  from  the  beginning  not  in  a  like  relation  to  the  aap^  with  our  ego. 
Herein  consisted  the  mere  similarity  and  not  perfect  equality  with  us  in  refer- 
ence to  the  body." 


310  THE    TEACHER 

Christology  of  the  original  apostles  and  that  of  the  post- 
Pauline  Epistles  to  the  Colossians  and  Ephesians,  and  by 
its  idea  of  the  preexistence  of  Christ  prepared  the  way  for 
the  Johannine  doctrine  of  the  Logos,  who  was  with  God, 
and  was  God.  In  originality  of  conception,  in  mystic  pro- 
fundity and  spiritual  insight,  it  is  preeminent  among  the 
Christologies  of  the  early  Church. 


CHAPTER    XIII 

SUPERNATURALISM  — THE   SPIRIT.* 

ONE  is  doubtless  not  justified  in  speaking  of  a  primi- 
tive-Christian philosophy  of  religion  in  any  other 
sense  than  that  definite  and  easily  discernible  principles 
underlie  the  accounts  given  by  the  New  Testament  writers 
of  the  religious  phenomena  and  experiences  of  the  time. 
The  one  point  of  view  common  to  these  writers  is  that 
the  knowledge  of  spiritual  truth,  the  religious  life,  the  ex- 
ternal authentications  of  their  belief,  all  come  from  a 
supersensible  world,  or  are  of  heavenly  origin.  The  Old 
Testament  prophecy  that  the  Messiah  should  come  out  of 
Judah,  or  that  he  would  be  a  lineal  descendant  of  David 
in  the  natural  order,  their  age  could  not  let  stand  in  its 
original  sense,  and  accordingly  produced  the  legend  of  the 
miraculous  conception  of  the  mother  of  Jesus.  The  mis- 
sion and  work  of  Jesus  and  his  place  in  the  historical  order 
could  not,  of  course,  be  apprehended  in  such  a  time  as 
having  a  natural  connection  with  Hebraism  and  Judaism 
in  the  sense  of  bearing  a  relation  to  them  in  the  course  of 
normal  human  progress.  Hence  he  is  thought  to  have 
come  into  the  world  through  the  agency  of  the  Holy  Ghost 
and  announced  by  angels,  or  to  have  descended  as  a  pre- 
existent  divine  being  out  of  the  glory  which  he  had  with 
the  Father  before  the  world  was  (Matt.  i.  i8,  20;  John 
xvii.  5).  Not  only  is  he  regarded  by  the  evangelists  as  a 
miracle-worker,  but  he  is  reported  to  have  appealed  to  his 

*  The  New  Worldy  September,  1898.     (With  revision  and  additions.) 

311 


312  THE    TEACHER 

supernatural  powers  as  evidence  of  his  Messiahship  (Matt, 
xi.  4  f.).  These  powers  are  represented  to  have  been  trans- 
ferred to  the  apostles  (Matt.  x.  i ;  Acts  iii.  7,  xiv.  3) ;  those 
who  should  believe  in  their  message  would  be  superior  to 
such  natural  forces  as  fire  and  poison  (Mark  xvi.  18),*  and 
the  possession  of  ability  to  perform  miracles  is  regarded  as 
an  evidence  of  apostleship  (2  Cor.  xii.  12). 

The  primitive-Christian  supernaturalism,  however,  reached 
its  highest  point,  and  attained  its  most  refined  expression  in 
the  conception  of  the  Spirit.  This  is  especially  true  of 
Paul,  who  appears  to  have  attached  only  a  subordinate 
importance  to  merely  external  supernatural  phenomena. 
Before  discussing  his  views  on  this  important  subject  it 
will  be  well  to  consider  briefly  the  popular  ideas  of  the 
operations  of  the  Spirit  chiefly  as  they  appear  in  the  synop- 
tic Gospels  and  the  Acts.  Here  in  the  first  place  is  to  be 
noted  a  considerable  contraction  of  the  field  of  the  activity 
of  the  Spirit  in  comparison  with  the  Old  Testament  point 
of  view,  according  to  which  any  extraordinary  manifesta- 
tion of  power,  as  in  the  case  of  Samson,  Othniel,  Gideon, 
etc.,  as  well  as  the  spiritual  endowments  of  the  prophets 
and  men  of  God,  is  referred  to  this  source,  f  Gunkel  has 
shown  the  error  in  Cremer's  view  that  all  self-manifesta- 
tion of  God  was  ascribed  by  the  early  Christians  to  the 
Spirit,  and  has  successfully  maintained  that,  almost  with- 
out exception,  only  such  events  as  concern  the  life  of  man 
are  regarded  as  due  to  its  activity.  This  is  in  general  true 
of  the  works  represented  as  done  by  Jesus,  who  must  have 
been  thought  to  owe  his  power  to  the  Spirit,  whether  be- 

*The  spuriousness  of  the  section  in  which  this  passage  occurs  does  not  affect 
the  present  discussion,  which  is  concerned  only  with  the  ideas  prevalent  in  the 
early  Christian  community. 

t  Judges  iii.  lo,  vi.  34,  xiii.  25,  xiv.  6,  19,  xv.  14;  I  Sam.  xvi.  13;  Ex.  xxviii. 
3,  xxxi.  3  ;    Isa.  xi.  2,  Ixi.  I. 


SUPERNA  TURALISM—  THE   SPIRIT  3  i  3 

Stowed  at  his  conception  or  at  the  baptism.  The  ''works  " 
wrought  upon  external  nature  are  comparatively  few.  An 
important  feature  of  the  popular  primitive-Christian  con- 
ception of  the  operations  of  the  Spirit,  whereby  it  is 
essentially  different  from  that  of  Paul,  is  that  it  is  not 
regarded  as  the  principle  of  the  moral-religious  life  to 
which  all  Christian  activities  are  to  be  referred.  This  has 
been  shown  by  Weiss,  Pfleiderer,  Gunkel,  and  Harnack, 
and  Gloel  has  not  succeeded  in  maintaining  the  contrary. 

According  to  the  popular  view,  the  Spirit  manifested 
itself  in  exceptional  ''  mighty  works  "  {hwdyum)  rather  than 
in  the  ethical  and  religious  daily  walk.  Peter,  therefore, 
is  represented  as  seeing  in  the  extraordinary  phenomena 
on  the  day  of  Pentecost  the  fulfilment  of  the  prophecy  of 
Joel  as  to  the  pouring  out  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  the  mani- 
festations of  which  would  be  in  prophesying,  the  seeing  of 
visions,  and  the  dreaming  of  dreams  (Acts  ii.  17-19).  The 
Spirit  was  thus  Messianic  in  the  sense  that  its  operations 
belonged  in  part  according  to  the  prophetic  promise  to  "  the 
last  times,"  which  it  was  conceived  would  abound  in 
strange  and  miraculous  phenomena.  Thus  we  find  Stephen 
reported  as  doing  *' great  wonders  and  miracles  among  the 
people"  because  he  was  "full  of  the  Holy  Ghost,"  and  his 
discourse  could  not  be  resisted  on  account  of  "the  power 
and  the  Spirit  by  which  he  spake  "  (Acts  vi.  8,  10).  The 
apostles  are  promised  miraculous  instruction  in  their  com- 
ing extremity  (Matt.  x.  18  f.).  When  Cornelius  of  Csesarea 
and  other  gentiles  received  the  Spirit  on  the  occasion  of 
Peter's  discourse,  the  only  sign  of  their  possession  men- 
tioned by  the  writer  of  Acts  was  that  "  they  heard  them 
speak  with  tongues  and  magnify  God "  (x.  44-46).  It 
would  be  easy  to  show  by  numerous  citations  from  the 
prophets  that  their  view  of  the  matter  was  in  general  the 
same.     The  gift  of  the  Spirit  was  to  them  an  exalted  know- 


314  THE    TEACHER 

ledge,  insight,  courage  in  the  performance  of  their  official 
functions  of  revelation  of  the  divine  will,  or,  as  Wendt 
expresses  it,  "  genius  in  the  religious  domain."*  In  the 
later  Judaism,  the  intimate  connection  of  which  with  Chris- 
tianity should  not  be  overlooked,  a  similar  view  of  the 
matter  was  the  prevalent  one,  although  few  phenomena 
of  the  kind  appear. 

There  can  be  little  doubt,  after  Gunkel's  careful  discus- 
sion of  the  matter,  that  in  the  primitive  church  the  mani- 
festations of  the  Spirit  were  recognised  as  such  by  their 
wonderful,  exceptional,  or,  in  other  words,  their  supposed 
supernatural  character,  rather  than  by  any  end  they  might 
have  been  believed  to  serve  in  the  divine  economy.  The 
commandment  of  the  Spirit  is  simply  recognised  as  an  in- 
ward divine  intimation  which  orders,  or  does  not  ''permit" 
(Acts  xvi.  6,  7).  A  prophet  speaks,  and  is  at  once  believed, 
because  his  message  is  regarded  as  supernatural  (Acts  xi. 
27-29).  The  sound  as  of  a  rushing  mighty  wind,  the  pen- 
tecostal  flame,  and  the  speaking  with  tongues  testify  to  the 
descent  of  the  Spirit  from  above.  When  the  new  converts 
break  forth  in  inarticulate  utterances,  the  evidence  is  at 
hand,  and  no  other  seems  to  be  needed  or  thought  of,  that 
the  supernatural  divine  presence  has  come  upon  them. 
When  Paul  lays  his  hands  upon  the  disciples  at  Ephesus, 
who  had  ''not  so  much  as  heard  whether  there  be  any 
Holy  Ghost,"  the  Spirit  comes  upon  them,  and  they  "speak 
with  tongues,  and  prophesy."  Here  it  is  evident  that  "the 
Spirit  gives  them  utterance,"  and  that  the  external  phe- 
nomena furnish  the  evidence  of  its  operation  (Acts  xix.  6). 
God  himself  "bears  witness"  to  the  calling  of  the  gen- 
tiles in  that  He  bestows  upon  them  the  Holy  Ghost 
(Acts  XV.  8). 

*  Gunkel  has  shown  by  an  analysis  of  a  large  number  of  passages  that  in  the 
prophets  the  moral-religious  operations  of  the  Spirit  are  to  others  in  the  ratio 
of  I  to  5. 


SUPERNA  TURALISM—  THE   SPIRIT  3 1  5 

One  of  the  most  conspicuous  evidences  to  the  early 
Christians  of  the  presence  of  the  Spirit  was  the  so-called 
''speaking  with  tongues  "  (7Xa)o-crat9  \a\elv).  The  mean- 
ing of  the  term  is  not  precisely  determinable,  and  we 
cannot  profitably  undertake  more  than  to  deal  with  the 
phenomena  as  they  are  presented  to  us.  Certain  it  is  that, 
however  we  may  attempt  to  explain  them  by  our  psy- 
chology as  natural  expressions  of  the  human  mind  under 
certain  conditions,  they  were  regarded  as  supernatural  in 
their  time,  and  are  placed  by  Paul  among  "  the  gifts  of  the 
Spirit  "  (i  Cor.  xii.  10).  Whether  we  hold  with  Weizsacker, 
Heinrici,  Gunkel,  and  others  that  the  preference  for  this 
gift  which  prevailed  in  the  Corinthian  church  according  to 
I  Cor.  xiv.  was  due  to  the  previous  gentile  religious  views 
of  the  believers  there  or  not,  is  unimportant,  for  that  it 
was  also  appreciated  by  Jewish  Christians  is  evident  from 
Acts,  to  the  sources  of  which  it  could  hardly  have  been 
foreiofn.  It  seems  to  have  had  different  manifestations,  for 
Paul  speaks  of  "kinds  of  tongues  "  (i  Cor.  xii.  10),  and  also 
to  have  been  bestowed  upon  some  to  the  exclusion  of 
others  (i  Cor.  xii.  30,  *'do  all  speak  with  tongues.?");  and 
it  appears  that  those  who  possessed  it  exalted  themselves 
on  account  of  it  above  their  less  fortunate  brethren,  and 
became  objects  of  their  envy  (i  Cor.  xii.  12-28).  Paul 
evidently  saw  that  the  church  was  threatened  with  schism 
(verse  25),  and  the  fourteenth  chapter  of  the  Epistle  is 
intended  to  obviate  a  too  high  estimate  of  the  gift.  From 
this  chapter  we  learn  something  of  the  character  of  the  man- 
ifestations of  this  charism,  which  was  doubtless  esteemed 
so  highly  above  other  endowments  of  the  Spirit  because 
of  its  extraordinary  and  wonderful  features.  He  who  spoke 
"in  a  tongue"  did  not  speak  "to  men,"  but  to  God,  "for 
no  man  understandeth  him."  He  might  thereby  "  edify 
himself,"  but  not  the  church,  for,  says  the  apostle,  "if  I 


3l6  THE    TEACHER 

know  not  the  meaning  of  the  voice,  I  shall  be  unto  him 
that  speaketh  a  barbarian."  There  was  wanting  **a  dis- 
tinction in  the  sounds  "  comparable  to  *' an  uncertain  sound  " 
of  a  trumpet  or  a  confused  playing  of  a  pipe  or  harp. 

This  defect  (for  so  the  apostle  evidently  regarded  it) 
was  due  to  the  fact  that  the  subject  did  not  himself  know 
what  he  was  saying,  for  when  a  prayer  was  uttered  ''  in  a 
tongue"  the  "Spirit"  prayed,  but  the  ''understanding" 
{yov<i)  was  "unfruitful."  Since  the  speaking  with  tongues 
is  accounted  one  of  the  gifts  of  the  Spirit,  it  is  probable 
that  praying  with  the  Spirit  and  blessing  with  the  Spirit 
should  be  interpreted  as  manifestations  of  the  divine  power, 
*'divers  kinds  of  tongues."  It  is  evident,  then,  that  the 
operations  of  the  Spirit  which  the  apostle  could  commend, 
such  as  "prophesying,"  were  not  incompatible  with  the  nor- 
mal use  of  the  subject's  own  intelligence,  and  in  fact  re- 
quired it  in  order  to  be  fruitful.  The  speaking  "  with  a 
tongue,"  the  utterance  of  mere  words  or  sounds  without 
"distinction,"  was  unprofitable  to  the  hearer  without  an 
"interpretation,"  which  was  of  itself  a  special  gift  of  the 
Spirit.  The  nature  of  this  operation  is  not  defined,  but  it 
is  likely  that  the  ability  was  possessed  by  some  to  enter 
into  such  a  relation  with  the  speaker  as  enabled  them  to 
convey  to  the  congregation  an  idea  of  the  general  drift  of 
the  ecstatic  and  indistinct  utterance  of  feeling  in  which  his 
understanding  was  unfruitful.  It  is  evident,  then,  that  in 
the  speaking  "with  a  tongue"  the  subject  was  supposed  to 
be  overcome  by  the  power  of  the  Spirit,  so  that  he  was  pas- 
sive under  its  influence  and  without  the  normal  use  of  his 
faculties.  Accordingly  Paul  says  that  "the  unlearned  or 
unbelievers  "  who  witness  the  performance  will  think  the 
subjects  to  be  "mad."  The  author  of  Acts  has  preserved 
a  feature  which  throws  light  upon  the  matter,  when  he  says 
that  on  the  pentecostal  occasion  the  perplexed  bystanders 


SUPERNA  TURALISM—  THE   SPIRIT  3  1 7 

remarked  that  the  subjects  of  the  possession  were  "full  of 
new  wine,"  although  he  misunderstood  the  nature  of  the 
phenomenon  in  supposing  that  it  consisted  in  speaking  in 
foreign  languages. 

Related  to  these  phenomena  in  the  sense  that  they  were 
supposed  to  have  a  supernatural  origin  are  the  operations 
of  the  Spirit  designated  ''visions  and  revelations."  The 
subject  is  supposed  to  be  "in  the  Spirit,"  to  be  impelled  or 
driven  by  the  Spirit,  doubtless  in  a  manner  which  involved 
the  suspension  of  his  own  volition  and  the  subordination  of 
his  intelligence  (Rev.  i.  10;  Luke  ii.  27,  iv.  i,  14;  Acts 
viii.  29).  When  the  apostle  was  on  one  occasion  the  sub- 
ject of  such  a  revelation  he  did  not  know  whether  he  was 
in  the  body  or  out  of  it  (2  Cor.  xii.  2,  3).  He  thought  him- 
self "caught  up  into  the  third  heaven,"  where  he  heard 
"  unspeakable  words."  On  the  way  to  Damascus  he  hears 
Jesus  speak  from  heaven  in  the  midst  of  a  blinding  light. 
He  has  a  "  revelation  "  that  he  must  go  to  Jerusalem.  It 
is  by  the  command  of  the  Holy  Ghost  that  he  and  Barnabas 
were  set  apart  for  the  work  of  the  ministry,  and  by  the 
same  divine  power  they  were  "  sent  forth."*  The  Spirit  is 
regarded  as  laying  upon  those  whom  it  possesses  an  irresist- 
ible compulsion.  Paul  goes  "bound  in  the  Spirit"  to  Jeru- 
salem, and  knows  nothing  of  his  future  fortune,  except  that 
"the  Holy  Ghost  witnesseth  in  every  city"  of  the  coming 
"bonds  and  afflictions"  (Acts  xx.  22  f.).  Manifestly  he 
felt  it  to  be  a  power  not  himself  which  thus  commanded, 
impelled,  or  restrained  him,  and  even  overcame  his  own 
endeavour  (Acts  xvi.  6  f.). 

Prophecy,  in  like  manner,  which  Paul  recommends  as 
preferable  to  the  speaking  with  tongues  (i  Cor.  xiv.  i),  was 
a  gift  of  the  Spirit  bestowed  upon  certain  believers  ;  but  w^e 

*  2  Cor.  xii.  4  ff.;  Gal.  ii.  2;  Acts  ix.  3,  xiii.  2,  xvi.  6  ;  cf.  Acts  vii.  55,  viii. 
39;  Apoc.  Bar.  vi.;   Enoch  xxxix.  3,  lii.  i. 


3l8  THE    TEACHER 

are  ignorant  of  the  personal  qualifications  which  drew  down 
this  blessing  and  of  the  activity  on  the  part  of  any  one  that 
might  effect  its  descent.  For  the  injunction  to  "strive 
earnestly  for  the  best  gifts"  (i  Cor.  xii.  31)  implies  other 
conditions  than  pure  passivity  in  the  subject.  It  is  probable 
that  exceptional  endowments  from  above  such  as  "  wisdom," 
which  all  did  not  possess  (Acts  vi.  3),  and  the  being  "  full  of 
the  Holy  Ghost"  were  conditioned  by  subjective  qualities 
apart  from  faith,  which  was  a  common  qualification.  The 
words  "  ye  may  all  prophesy  "  (i  Cor.  xiv.  31)  must  be  under- 
stood in  the  sense  that  "all"  means  all  who  have  the  gift, 
which  according  to  i  Cor.  xii.  10,  belonged  only  to  some  be- 
lievers. The  prophet  had  in  the  first  place  a  power,  evidently 
thought  to  be  supernatural,  of  foretelling  future  events 
which  were  hidden  from  the  ordinary  knowledge  of  men. 
So  Agabus  predicts  a  famine  and  the  delivery  of  Paul  by  the 
Jews  into  the  hands  of  the  gentiles  at  Jerusalem  (Acts  xi. 
28,  xxi.  10).  But  this  was  not  the  prophet's  sole  function, 
for  by  him  the  secrets  of  the  heart  of  an  unbeliever  may  be 
revealed,  so  that  he  will  fall  down  and  worship  God,  and 
report  that  God  is  in  the  believers  (i  Cor.  xiv.  24  f.).  The 
revelation  which  comes  to  the  prophet  is  of  such  a  nature 
that  "all  may  learn,  and  all  may  be  comforted"  (verses  30, 
31).  That  the  prophetic  discourses  had  a  religious  and 
eschatological  content  is  very  probable.  The  apostle  him- 
self enjoyed  revelations  as  to  the  religious  future  of  the 
Jews  and  as  to  the  great  consummation  of  the  kingdom 
(Rom.  xi.  26  ;  i  Cor.  xv.  24  ff.,  49-54),  and  in  the  early 
church  religion  and  "  the  last  things  "  were  intimately  con- 
nected. Faith  in  Jesus  was  faith  in  the  resurrected  and 
ascended  Lord  who  was  soon  to  come  in  glory.  The  de- 
livery of  the  prophecy  is  distinguished  from  the  speaking 
with  tongues  in  that  it  is  intelligible.  The  prophet  addresses 
himself  not  to  God,  but  to  men,  and  he  speaks  to  "edifica- 


SUPERNATURALISM—THE   SPIRIT  319 

tion  and  exhortation  and  comfort."  Thus,  he  is  not  mas- 
tered by  his  enthusiasm  and  inspiration,  for  "  the  spirits  of 
the  prophets  are  subject  to  the  prophets  "  (i  Cor.  xiv.  3,  32). 
Since  the  Spirit  was  bestowed  only  upon  Christians,  and 
accordingly  on.  condition  of  a  confession  of  Jesus  and  faith, 
the  mention  of  "faith"  as  one  of  the  "gifts"  of  the  Spirit 
(i  Cor.  xii.  9)  is  somewhat  surprising.  But  the  apostle 
probably  had  in  mind  an  intensified  quality  of  this  Christian 
grace  which  would  render  its  possessor  steadfast  in  trial 
and  persecution  and  temptation,  or  give  him  a  "boldness" 
like  that  of  the  apostles  Peter  and  John,  who,  when  "filled 
with  the  Holy  Ghost,"  declared  the  word  without  fear  (Acts 
iv.  29,  31).  The  point  of  interest  is  that  all  extraordinary 
achievements  in  the  religious  domain  were  regarded  by  the 
early  Christians  as  effected  not  by  an  intensified  human 
energy  and  will,  but  by  a  supernatural  power.  Supernatural 
also  were  thought  to  be  the  gifts  of  "healing,"  "the  word 
of  wisdom,"  "the  word  of  knowledge,"  whatever  fine  dis- 
tinction may  be  drawn  between  these  two,  "the  working  of 
miracles,"  "the  discerning  of  Spirits,"  and  "the  interpreta- 
tion of  tongues."  Since  of  those  whom  God  "has  set  in 
the  church  "  apostles  are  accounted  "first  "  (i  Cor.  xii.  28), 
it  must  be  assumed  that  Paul  regarded  the  charism  of 
apostleship  as  the  most  important  among  the  supernatural 
endowments  bestowed  upon  the  Christians.  More  than  any 
other  must  he  be  "filled  with  the  Holy  Ghost"  who  was 
appointed  to  be  the  founder  and  counsellor  of  churches  and 
the  guide  of  souls.  To  him  were  vouchsafed  "revelations 
and  visions  of  the  Lord  "  (2  Cor.  xii.  i);  he  could  show  as 
his  authentication  "  the  signs  of  an  apostle  "  in  "  wonders 
and  mighty  deeds"  (verse  12;  Rom.  xv.  18  f.),  and  his 
preaching  was  in  "  demonstration  of  the  Spirit  and  of  power" 
(i  Cor.  ii.  4).  He  did  not  live  his  spiritual  life  apart  and 
by  himself,  but  in  constant  intercourse  with  the  supersen- 


320  •  THE    TEACHER 

sible  world,  whence  came  to  him  counsel  in  emergencies, 
revelations,  and  supernatural  power.  The  Spirit  which  he 
has  received  is  not  that  of  this  world,  but  the  Spirit  of  God, 
and  the  wisdom  which  he  speaks  is  that  of  God  "in  a  mys- 
tery" (i  Cor.  ii.  7,  12). 

It  is  apparent  from  the  foregoing  discussion  that  Paul 
adopted  the  popular  supernaturalism  of  the  primitive 
church,  while  he  endeavoured  to  moderate  the  zeal  of  some 
of  the  believers  in  respect  to  the  gift  of  tongues.  We  have 
now  to  consider  how,  proceeding  from  the  same  general 
point  of  view,  he  enlarged  and  exalted  the  supernaturalistic 
conception  in  connection  with  his  profounder  views  of  reli- 
gious experience,  of  salvation,  and  of  the  coming  kingdom  of 
God.  But  first  of  all  let  it  be  considered  that  we  have  not 
here  to  deal  with  a  dogmatic  construction.  The  apostle 
indeed  proceeded  upon  the  premises  of  supernaturalism,  as 
he  could  not  but  do  from  the  Jewish  religious  point  of  view; 
but  the  new  creation  which  he  produced  was  evolved  out 
of  his  own  Christian  experience.  This  began  with  his 
conversion  which,  explain  it  as  we  may  from  natural  psy- 
chological antecedents,  he  regarded  as  supernatural,  as 
nothing  short  of  God's  revelation  of  His  Son  in  him,  that 
he  ** might  preach  him  among  the  heathen"  (Gal.  i.  16). 
To  him  Christ  crucified  and  raised  from  the  dead  was  the 
beginning  of  a  new  supernatural  religious  order  which  did 
not  supplement,  but  did  away  with,  the  former  divine  dis- 
pensation of  the  law.  "  For  what  the  law  could  not  do, 
.  .  .  God  sending  His  own  Son,  .  .  .  condemned  sin  in 
the  flesh  ;  that  the  righteousness  of  the  law  might  be  ful- 
filled in  us,  who  walk  not  after  tlie  flesh,  but  after  the 
Spirit  "  (Rom.  viii.  3  f.). 

Paul  recognised  no  natural  schem.e  of  salvation,  no  natu- 
ral connection  between  the  state  of  sin  and  the  state  of 
''grace."     To  him  the  transition  from  the  former  condition 


SUPERNA  TURALISM  —  THE   SPIRIT  3  2 1 

to  the  latter  was  not  made  by  a  process  of  development,  of 
growth,  of  the  slow  formation  of  character,  according  to 
the  modern  philosophy  of  religious  experience,  but  the 
entire  process  was  supernatural  —  an  atonement  for  sin 
provided  for  in  the  divine  counsel  and  an  illuminating 
Spirit  sent  down  from  heaven  (Rom.  v.  18  f.,  viii.  10  f.,  16 
f.  ;  Gal.iii.  13  f.).  That  the  divine  bestowal  of  the  Spirit 
is  conditioned  upon  the  atonement  is  evident  from  the  con- 
nection of  thought  in  Gal.  iii.  13  f. :  "  Christ  hath  redeemed 
us  from  the  curse  of  the  law,  .  .  .  that  we  might  receive 
the  promise  of  the  Spirit  through  faith."  Without  the 
atonement  of  Christ  and  its  acceptance  through  faith  there 
is  no  "newness  of  life"  in  the  Spirit,  but  man  remains 
"under  the  curse"  (Gal.  iii.  10). 

The  supermundane  origin  and  character  of  the  entire 
scheme  are  manifest.  It  is  only  through  faith  in  the  super- 
natural Christ  that  the  blessing  of  Abraham  could  come 
on  the  gentiles  (verse  14).  For  notwithstanding  the  an- 
nouncement of  "  glory,  honour,  and  peace  to  every  man  that 
worketh  good,  to  the  Jew  first  and  also  to  the  gentile,"  and 
the  declaration  that  "the  doers  of  the  law,"  Jew  or  gentile, 
"shall  be  justified"  (Rom.  ii.  10,  13  f.),  the  manifest  infer- 
ence from  Gal.  iii.  8-15  is  that  the  gentiles,  however  faith- 
fully they  might  "do  by  nature  the  things  contained  in  the 
law,"  could  not  naturally  attain  salvation  in  the  Pauline 
sense  of  the  word.  The  author  of  Ephesians  expresses  the 
Pauline  view  as  to  the  gentiles  when  he  says  that  they 
were  "without  Christ  .  .  .  having  no  hope  and  without 
God  in  the  world  "  (Eph.  ii.  12).  They  became  "  partakers 
of  the  promise"  only  through  the  same  atonement  which 
opened  the  way  of  salvation  to  the  Jews.  The  funda- 
mental proposition  of  salvation  through  Christ  according  to 
Paul  is  that  of  justification  by  faith.  The  ethical  require- 
ments of  the  law  can  be  fulfilled  neither  by  Jew  nor  gentile. 


322  THE    TEACHER 

The  law  must  first  be  abrogated  for  the  Jews  by  the  atone- 
ment, that  the  promise  to  Abraham  which  primarily  con- 
cerned only  his  seed  might  be  extended  to  the  gentiles ; 
both  must  first  accept  by  faith  the  supernatural  scheme  of 
satisfaction,  before  they  can  come  under  ''  the  law  of  the 
Spirit  of  life  in  Jesus  Christ  "  (Rom.  viii.  2).  The  incom- 
patibility of  this  doctrine  with  the  naturalism  of  Rom.  ii. 
13  will  surprise  no  careful  student  of  the  apostle. 

A  similar  point  of  view,  that  is,  one  transcending  natural 
human  experience  and  taking  no  account  of  the  law  of 
growth,  is  represented  in  the  doctrine  of  dying  and  being 
raised  with  Christ  in  baptism.  The  apostle,  having  de- 
clared that  where  sin  abounded  grace  did  much  more 
abound,  anticipates  the  question,  ''  Shall  we  then  continue 
in  sin,  that  grace  may  abound.^"  "Far  be  it!"  he  an- 
swers ;  how  shall  we  believers  who  are  dead  to  sin  live  any 
longer  in  it  1  In  our  baptism  we  were  baptized  into  the 
death  of  Christ.  Having  been  buried  with  him  by  baptism 
into  death,  we  should  walk  in  newness  of  life,  as  he  was 
raised  up.  Our  old  man  is  crucified  with  him,  that  the 
body  of  sin  might  be  destroyed,  that  henceforth  we  should 
not  serve  sin.  For  he  that  is  dead  is  freed  from  sin.  So 
we  should  reckon  ourselves  dead  to  sin,  but  alive  to  God 
through  Christ  (Rom.  vi.  i-ii).  This  does  not  mean  that 
in  believing  in  the  ethical  principles  of  the  life  of  Jesus, 
taking  him  as  our  example,  and  assuming  in  baptism  the 
vows  of  a  Christian  life,  we  receive  a  moral-spiritual  im- 
pulse which  will  aid  us  in  the  conflict  with  evil  tendencies, 
and  give  us  at  length  the  victory.  All  this  is  modern 
rationalising  of  the  apostle's  doctrine.  For  with  him  the 
whole  process  of  the  believer's  renewal  depends  upon  the 
death  of  Christ.  In  his  death  *'to  sin  once"  Christ  super- 
naturally  (magically })  broke  the  power  of  sin  and  the 
flesh  for  all  who  should  believe  on  him.     On  the  cross  God 


SUPERNATURALISM— THE   SPIRIT  323 

''condemned  sin  in  the  flesh."  In  the  resurrection  of 
Jesus  He  showed  the  triumph  of  the  Spirit  over  death. 
Baptism,  then,  is  to  Paul  a  magical  rite,  a  symbol  of  the 
believer's  appropriation  through  faith  of  the  death  and 
resurrection  of  Jesus  —  of  the  crucifixion  of  "  the  old  man  " 
and  the  raising  up  of  ''the  new  man." 

The  connection  between  Jesus  and  the  believer  is  such 
that  "if  one  [Jesus]  died  for  all,  then  all  died,"  that  is,  all 
who  through  faith  appropriate  his  death  die  with  him  to  the 
flesh  and  sin,  "crucify  the  flesh  with  its  affections  and 
lusts"  (Gal.  v.  24).  Thus  "he  that  is  dead  is  freed  from 
sin."  In  the  believer's  magical  death  with  Christ  he  has 
paid  the  legal  penalty  of  sin,  which  is  death,  and  is  there- 
fore set  free  from  it;  his  "old  man"  has  perished;  the 
claims  of  the  law  are  satisfied,  and  he  is  no  longer  under 
its  "  curse,"  for  now  he  is  subject  only  to  "the  law  of  the 
Spirit  of  life  in  Jesus  Christ."  How  evidently  does 
the  great  and  marvellous  transaction  on  the  cross  lie  at  the 
basis  of  this  entire  dogmatic  structure  !  Without  it  there 
would  have  been  no  such  profound  significance  to  Paul  in 
the  rite  of  baptism.  If  "  the  old  man  "  dies  in  baptism,  it  is 
because  the  subject  of  the  rite  has  by  faith  appropriated  to 
himself  the  death  of  Christ.  But  the  apostle  does  not  con- 
ceive the  believer's  relation  to  Christ  in  this  mystic  dying 
and  living  again  with  him  simply  in  connection  with  the 
present  life.  His  view  includes  an  intensification  of  the 
marvellous  in  the  extension  of  the  fellowship  into  the  life  to 
come  ;  and  in  this  fact  we  have  conclusive  evidence  that  a 
merely  ethical  conception  of  the  believer's  relation  to 
Christ  was  not  in  his  thought.  When  he  says,  "  For  if  we 
have  been  planted  together  in  the  likeness  of  his  death,  we 
shall  be  also  in  the  likeness  of  his  resurrection,"  and,  "  Now 
if  we  be  dead  with  Christ,  we  believe  that  we  shall  also  live 
with  him"  (Rom.  vi.   5,  8),  the  future  tense  can  only  be 


324  '^HE    TEACHER 

understood  as  referring  to  the  resurrection  and  the  life  of 
the  Messianic  age.  Verse  8  certainly  cannot  mean,  we 
believe  that  we  do  now,  or  shall  now,  in  this  present  life 
live  with  him.  The  fundamental  idea  of  the  whole  section 
is  that  of  the  supernatural  "life"  of  which  the  believer 
partakes  through  union  with  Christ  in  his  death  and  resur- 
rection ;  and  the  two  aspects  of  this  life  are  presented,  that 
of  this  age  as  a  new  order  of  spiritual  existence  in  which 
he  ''should  walk,"  and  in  which  he  should  judge  himself 
to  be  ''alive  unto  God"  (verses  4,  8),  and  that  of  the  glori- 
ous age  near  at  hand,  the  consummation  of  the  great  mira- 
cle of  redemption,  when  in  the  resurrection  he  would  enter 
into  everlasting  fellowship  with  Christ  the  Lord.  The 
latter  is  probably  the  basal  idea ;  for  to  Paul  "  life "  was 
primarily  the  eternal  life  of  the  resurrection-state,  which 
reacted  upon  the  present  not  only  so  that  the  believer  was 
"  saved  by  hope,"  but  also  in  such  a  manner  as  to  conse- 
crate his  daily  walk,  and  render  it  worthy  of  the  great  fort- 
une reserved  for  him. 

From  these  considerations  is  manifest  the  important 
modification  of  the  primitive-Christian  conception  of  the 
Spirit  which  Paul  effected.  In  his  hands  the  Spirit  is  no 
longer  "an  abstract-supernatural,  ecstatic-apocalyptic  prin- 
ciple," according  to  Pfleiderer,  but  is  brought  into  living 
connection  with  the  moral-religious  life,  so  that  the  whole 
Christian  experience  of  the  believer  is  dominated  by  its 
influence.  The  Spirit,  however,  as  a  constant  life-giving 
presence  must  not  be  understood  as  divested  of  its  super- 
natural character.  This  is  fundamental  in  the  apostle's 
thought,  and,  as  has  been  remarked,  he  recognised  all  the 
supernatural  and  "ecstatic-apocalyptic"  features  of  the 
popular  religion,  while  he  claimed  that  he  spoke  Avith 
tongues  more  than  all  those  in  Corinth  who  boasted  of 
this  gift  (i  Cor.  xiv.  18).     His  apostleship,  that  "treasure 


SUPERNATURALISM— THE   SPIRIT  325 

in  earthen  vessels,"  he  has  '*of  God."  He  is  ''an  apostle 
not  of  men  nor  through  man,  but  through  Jesus  Christ 
and  God  the  Father."  What  he  declares  is,  ''the  wisdom 
of  God  ordained  before  the  world,"  that  which  "the  Holy 
Ghost  teacheth  "  (i  Cor.  ii.  7,  13).  When  he  spoke  in 
"  the  demonstration  of  the  Spirit "  his  message  was  "  not 
of  this  world."  But  he  did  not  regard  himself  as  in  this 
respect  exceptional  among  the  believers. 

The  same  supernatural  power  poured  itself  out  upon  all. 
Whoever  gives  himself  in  faith  to  Christ  is  "joined  unto 
the  Lord  in  one  Spirit"  (i  Cor.  vi.  17);  and  since  the 
glorified  Jesus  is  himself  "that  Spirit"  (2  Cor.  iii.  17),  the 
believer,  in  this  union  with  him  which  is  effected  through 
faith  and  baptism,  becomes  a  partaker  in  that  supersensi- 
ble life.  By  no  laborious  effort  of  his  own,  but  by  the 
inflowing  of  a  divine  power  on  the  condition  of  faith  on 
his  part,  he  has  passed  from  death  into  life,  from  the  state 
of  sin  and  condemnation  and  bondage  into  "the  glorious 
liberty  of  the  sons  of  God."  "The  law  of  the  Spirit  of 
life  in  Christ  Jesus"  has  made  him  "free  from  the  law  of 
sin  and  death"  (Rom.  viii.  2).  He  is  "a  new  creation" 
{KaiVT)  KTiai^) — an  expression  in  which  a  divine  super- 
natural intervention  by  which  the  subject  is  transformed 
or  re-created  is  distinctly  implied.  "  The  love  of  God 
[God's  love]  is  shed  abroad "  in  his  "  heart  by  the  Holy 
Ghost"  (Rom.  v.  5).  In  the  renewal  of  the  mind  the  re- 
cipient of  the  Spirit  is  enabled  to  know  "the  deep  things 
of  God,"  such  as  "eye  hath  not  seen,  nor  ear  heard,  neither 
have  entered  into  the  heart  of  man,"  for  they  are  "  revealed 
by  the  Spirit "  (Rom.  xii.  2  ;   i  Cor.  ii.  9  f.). 

The  supernatural  divine  character  of  the  Spirit  in  the 
apostle's  teaching  is  emphasised  by  the  fact  that  the 
human  spirit  occupies  in  it  a  quite  subordinate  place.  In 
almost    all    the   places  where  "  Spirit "  is   mentioned   the 


326  THE    TEACHER 

reference  is  to  the  Holy  Spirit  or  the  Spirit  of  God,  and 
some  expositors  question  whether  Paul  recognised  a  spirit 
as  an  original  endowment  of  man.  This  position  has 
doubtful  exegetical  support,  although  the  general  analogy 
of  the  apostle's  doctrine  is  in  its  favour.  The  sanctifica- 
tion  of  "the  spirit,  soul,  and  body"  (i  Thess.  v.  23),  the 
exhortation  to  purify  from  **  all  filthiness  of  the  flesh  and 
spirit"  (2  Cor.  vii.  i),  and  the  "  saving  of  the  spirit  in  the 
day  of  the  Lord  "  (i  Cor.  v.  5)  can  certainly  not  be  referred 
to  the  divine  Spirit.  The  subject  presents  difficulties  which 
exegesis  has  not  satisfactorily  solved,  and  in  attempting  its 
solution  it  cannot  proceed  upon  the  presumption  that  the 
apostle  used  psychological  terms  with  scientific  exactness. 
In  any  case  he  does  not  attribute  to  the  "natural  "  man, 
that  is,  the  unregenerate  man,  a  spirit  {irvevixa)  in  the  sense 
in  which  he  generally  employs  the  term  of  the  supernatural, 
life-giving  energy  which  is  not  originally  in  man,  but  de- 
scends or  is  poured  out  upon  him  on  condition  of  faith. 
It  is  conceded  by  some  of  those  who  maintain  that  he 
does  not  ascribe  a  spirit  to  the  natural  man  that  he  some- 
times adopts  the  popular  usage,  and  employs  the  word  to 
designate  the  inward  motive  power,  as  when,  for  example, 
in  I  Cor.  ii.  1 1  a  "  spirit  of  man  "  is  mentioned  alongside 
the  Spirit  of  God  :  "  What  man  knoweth  the  things  of  a 
man  save  the  spirit  of  man  which  is  in  him  ? " 

But  one  cannot  conclude  from  this  passage  that  any  reli- 
gious function  is  assigned  to  the  human  spirit.  The  term 
Spirit  in  the  specific  religious  sense  in  which  the  apostle 
generally  employs  it  denotes  an  opposition  to  the  "flesh," 
that  is,  to  the  condition  of  the  natural  man,  and  designates 
a  supernatural  power  by  which  he  has  been  exalted  into  a 
state  which  he  could  not  of  himself  and  in  a  natural  way 
attain.  Accordingly,  Paul  could,  in  concession  to  the 
popular  usage,  speak  of  man  as  having  a  spirit  when  he 


SUPERNATURALISM—  THE   SPIRIT  327 

did  not  at  all  mean  to  designate  the  person  in  question  as 
a  ''pneumatic  "  (Trz^eu/xart/co?),  that  is,  one  who  had  through 
faith  received  the  heavenly  gift  of  the  divine  Spirit  (i  Cor. 
xiv.  37).*  In  I  Cor.  vi.  20  ''spirit"  should  be  omitted 
according  to  the  most  approved  reading.  The  power  of 
the  "inward  man  "  most  closely  related  to  the  divine  Spirit 
is  the  mind  (z^oi)?).  With  this  man  "  serves  the  law  of  God  " 
(Rom.  vii.  25),  but  ineffectually,  because  of  "the  law  in  the 
members"  which  "wars  against  the  law  of  the  mind,  and 
brings  him  into  captivity  to  the  law  of  sin  and  death " 
(verses  23,  24),  until  the  Spirit  of  God  comes  to  his  aid,  and 
delivers  him  from  "this  body  of  death."  Accordingly,  it 
is  difficult  from  the  point  of  view  of  scientific  accuracy  to 
find  a  function  for  the  human  spirit  in  this  psychology. 

While,  however,  the  apostle  teaches  that  man  cannot  of 
himself  attain  righteousness,  even  though  he  "delight  in 
the  law  of  God  after  the  inward  man,"  because  "the  law 
in  his  members"  compels  him  to  "do  the  evil  that  he 
would  not  do  "  (Rom.  viii.  19,  23),  and  while  he  regards 
the  divine  Spirit  as  the  only  saving  efficacy  in  this  ex- 
tremity, we  are  not  justified  in  drawing  the  conclusion 
that  he  looked  upon  the  moral-religious  life  of  the  believer 
as  controlled  by  this  superhuman  power  after  the  manner 
of  a  natural  necessity.  The  words  "led  by  the  Spirit," 
perhaps  "driven"  (a^yovraL,  Rom.  viii.  14),  appear  to  assign 
to  this  agency  the  initiative  and  doubtless  an  impelling 
function  in  the  Christian  life ;  but  it  is  evident  from  the 
analogy  of  the  apostle's  teaching  that,  just  as  a  voluntary 
appropriation  of  Christ  is  the  condition  of  receiving  the 
Spirit,  so  the  subject's  own  exertion  is  the  condition  of 
the  continuance  of  its  operations  in  the  religious  life  and 
of  the  final  enjoyment  of  the  eschatological  blessedness  at 

*  Such  is  the  sense  in  I  Cor.  v,  3,  4,  5,  vii.  34,  xiv.  14  f.  ;  2  Cor.  ii.  13,  vii.  13  ; 
Rom.  viii.  16,  xii.  ii. 


328  THE    TEACHER 

the  Parousia.  The  frequent  expression  of  his  anxiety  for 
the  continued  spiritual  welfare  of  his  converts  shows  that  the 
apostle  did  not  regard  their  religious  prosperity  as  deter- 
mined once  for  all  by  their  reception  of  the  Spirit  and  by 
their  entrance  into  fellowship  with  Christ  through  a  single 
act  of  faith.  The  situation  in  the  Corinthian  church  which 
called  forth  the  first  Epistle  is  a  case  in  point.* 

Although  Paul  thanks  God  on  behalf  of  the  believers 
there  for  the  grace  given  them  and  for  their  enrichment 
"in  all  utterance  and  knowledge,"  and  says  that  Christ 
will  confirm  them  to  the  end,  that  they  may  be  "blameless 
in  the  day  of  the  Lord  "  (the  Parousia),  yet  he  reproves 
them  in  that  they  have  fallen  into  contention  and  some 
of  them  even  into  fornication,  and  pointedly  charges  them 
with  being  "carnal"  (i.  4,  8,  11,  iii.  3,  v.  i).  Yet  he  de- 
clares of  these  brethren  that  they  "are  the  temple  of 
God,"  and  that  "the  Spirit  of  God  dwells  in  them" 
(iii.  16).  The  warning,  "  Let  him  that  thinketh  he  stand- 
eth  beware  lest  he  fall"  (i  Cor.  xii.  13),  throws  upon  him 
who  has  the  Spirit  the  responsibility  for  a  lapse  plainly 
implied  as  a  possibility.  The  apostle  even  includes  him- 
self among  those  to  whom  a  cleansing  (2  Cor.  vii.  i) 
is  necessary,  and  though  sanctification  comes  from  God 
(i  Thess.  V.  23),  man  must  work  out  his  own  salvation, 
through  God  who  works  in  him  to  will  and  to  do  of  His 
good  pleasure  (Phil.  ii.  12  f.). 

The  connection  between  the  operations  of  the  Spirit 
upon  believers  and  the  mission  of  Christ  —  more  specifi- 

*  It  is  not  certain,  however,  that  we  have  not  here  one  of  the  paradoxes  of 
the  apostle  —  theoretically  the  control  of  the  believer  by  the  Spirit,  the  cer- 
tainty of  his  salvation  as  its  possessor  and  as  one  of  the  "  elect,"  and  practi- 
cally a  recognition  of  the  necessity  that  he  be  frequently  exhorted  to  ethical 
endeavour,  as  if  the  whole  burden  of  the  conflict  with  the  flesh  should  not  be 
thrown  upon  the  Spirit,  and  as  if,  although  God  work  within  him,  he  must 
work  out  his  own  salvation  "  with  fear  and  trembling." 


SUPERiVA  TURALISM—  THE   SPIRIT  329 

cally  his  death  and  resurrection  —  has  aheady  been  men- 
tioned. It  is  an  error,  however,  to  suppose  that  the  relation 
of  Christ  and  the  Spirit  in  the  apostle's  teaching  is  such 
that  the  former  is  conceived  as  only  a  means  or  instru- 
ment of  the  operations  of  the  latter.  On  the  contrary,  no 
clear  distinction  is  drawn  between  the  work  of  the  two  in 
the  life  of  the  Christian,  with  the  exception  that  with  the 
mission  of  Jesus  the  entire  spiritual  economy  in  the  world 
originates,  and  on  it  depends.  Without  his  death  and 
resurrection  man  could  have  had  no  true  religious  life,  but 
would  have  remained  in  the  darkness  of  spiritual  death. 
That  Jesus  was  originally  and  before  he  came  into  the 
world,  that  is,  in  his  preexistent  state,  essentially  Spirit 
may  be  regarded  as  a  premise  of  the  apostle's  Christology. 
It  was  "  according  to  the  Spirit  of  holiness"  that  the  Son 
of  God  and  the  Son  of  David,  that  is,  the  Messiah,  was 
established  in  the  divine  sonship  '' ivith  poiver''  by  the 
resurrection  (Rom.  i.  3,  4).  As  ''the  second  man  the 
Lord  from  heaven,"  he  was  made  a  quickening  or  life-giv- 
ing Spirit  (i  Cor.  xv.  45,  47).  Accordingly,  the  functions 
of  the  Spirit  in  the  Christian  economy  of  salvation  are 
ascribed  to  him. 

The  supernatural  divine  "life,"  which  is  the  possession 
of  the  believer,  and  which  signifies  not  only  a  moral-re- 
ligious renewal  in  the  present  state  of  existence,  but  also 
the  final  triumph  over  death  in  the  resurrection,  is  enjoyed 
''with"  and  "through"  Christ  (Rom.  v.  17,  21,  vi.  5,  8, 
II,  23  ;  I  Cor.  XV.  22),  and  it  is  "in"  him  that  the  Chris- 
tian has  become  "anew  creation  "  (2  Cor.  v.  17).  The 
frequent  recurrence  of  the  expression  "in  Christ"  indi- 
cates how  near  to  the  apostle's  heart  lay  the  conviction  of 
his  and  his  fellow-believers'  union  with,  and  dependence 
on,  the  Lord.  The  Christian's  liberty  from  the  bondage 
of  "the  law  of  sin  and  death  "  is  through  "  the  law  of  the 


330  THE    TEACHER 

Spirit  of  life  in  Christ  Jesus  "  ;  the  love  of  God,  from 
which  nothing  can  separate  him,  is  '*in  Christ  Jesus  our 
Lord "  ;  the  grace  of  God  is  "  given  by  Jesus  Christ  " 
(Rom.  viii.  2,  39 ;  i  Cor.  i.  4  ;  Gal.  ii.  4)  ;  and  in  him  are 
consolation  and  hope  and  sanctification  (Phil.  ii.  i,  iii.  3; 
I  Cor.  i.  2).  Dr.  Weiss  has  pointed  out  that  Paul  some- 
times represents  the  Spirit  as  proceeding  from  Christ,  and 
v^e  find  ''Spirit  of  his  Son  "  (Gal.  iv.  6);  "if  so  be  that 
the  Spirit  of  God  dwell  in  you  "  and  ''  if  any  man  have  not 
the  Spirit  of  Christ,"  in  the  same  verse  (Rom.  viii.  9) ; 
and  "  Spirit  of  the  Lord"  (2  Cor.  iii.  17).  In  Rom.  xv. 
18,  19,  the  apostle  speaks  of  the  things  that  Christ  has 
wrought  by  him,  "  through  mighty  signs  and  wonders  by 
the  power  of  the  Spirit  of  God,"  thus  representing  his 
operation  as  indirect  instead  of  direct  or  as  himself  the 
Spirit.  Along  with  this  conception  we  have  an  identifica- 
tion of  Christ  and  the  Spirit,  as  has  been  remarked  (i  Cor. 
XV.  45  ;  2  Cor.  iii.  17),  and,  as  has  frequently  been  pointed 
out  by  students  of  the  apostle  (cf.  Pfleiderer,  Weiss,  Gun- 
kel,  and  others),  the  conception  of  a  mystic  union  of  the 
believers  with  Jesus  through  faith  and  baptism  in  a  won- 
derful fellowship  of  life  (Rom.  vi.  3-1 1  ;  Gal.  iii.  27,  vi. 
14),  in  which  he  ''puts  on  "  Christ,  Christ  is  "formed  in 
him  "  and  he  becomes  with  him  "  one  Spirit "  (Rom.  xiii. 
14;  I  Cor.  vi.  17;  Gal.  iv.  19).  This  language  cannot 
fairly  be  interpreted  as  expressing  simply  an  ethical  sym- 
pathy and  fellowship  with  Jesus,  or  such  an  inspiration  as 
might  be  induced  by  a  devout  contemplation  of  his  ex- 
ample. Such  an  explanation  does  not  touch  the  surface 
of  this  profound  mysticism. 

A  psychological  analysis  may  account  for  the  apostle's 
state  of  mind,  but  it  cannot  enable  us  to  enter  into  his 
consciousness  and  describe  it  —  a  consciousness  which  is 
possible  only  to  a  man  of  Paul's  mystical  nature  and  his 


SUPERNATURALISM— THE   SPIRIT  33  I 

absolute  and  ardent  faith  in  a  supernatural  Christ.  His 
own  account  of  the  union  by  means  of  an  analogy  with  the 
sexual  relation  (i  Cor.  vii.  6  f.)  he  must  himself  have  re- 
garded as  an  inadequate  explanation  of  a  reciprocal  connec- 
tion in  which  Jesus  is  conceived  as  imparting  his  life  to 
the  apostle  in  the  mystic  union  with  him,  so  that  it  is 
manifest  in  his  mortal  flesh  (2  Cor.  iv.  10  f.),  and  the  suf- 
ferings and  death  of  Christ  become  the  sufferings  and  death 
of  Paul  himself,  and  his  afflictions  Christ's  (2  Cor.  i.  5). 
This  great  mystery  of  the  identification  of  Christ  with  the 
Spirit  of  God  (in  operation,  though  doubtless  not  in  per- 
son) belongs  to  the  supernaturalistic  scheme  in  which  the 
apostle's  conversion  was  the  first  of  a  series  of  wonders, 
and  is  due  to  what  he  himself  had  undergone  in  the  tran- 
sition from  Judaism  to  Christianity.  As  Gunkel  observes  : 
"  The  first  pneumatic  experience  of  Paul  was  an  experi- 
ence of  Christ."  His  faith  in  Christ  as  the  Spirit  and  the 
source  of  his  strength,  the  fountain  of  his  religious  and 
moral  life,  did  not  rest  upon  a  speculative  basis,  but  was 
the  product  of  his  experience,  as  with  open  face  he  was 
ever  ''  beholding  the  glory  of  the  Lord,"  and  was  "  changed 
into  the  same  image  from  glory  to  glory,  as  by  the  Spirit 
of  the  Lord  "  (2  Cor.  iii.  18).  What  he  means  by  the  decla- 
ration that  Christ  had  been  "seen"  by  him  (i  Cor.  xv.  8), 
and  whether  or  no  it  implied  more  to  him  than  that  God 
"  revealed  His  Son  in  him,"  we  cannot  determine  ;  but  it 
is  evident  that  such  a  sense  as  he  had  of  the  miraculous 
indwelling  of  Jesus  and  of  his  own  mystic  connection  with 
him  could  belong  to  no  one  who  had  not  a  vivid  and  in- 
tense realisation  of  his  personality  as  a  living  presence. 
The  expression  of  his  willingness  rather  ''  to  be  absent 
from  the  body  and  present  with  the  Lord  "  (2  Cor.  v.  8)  is 
a  word  out  of  his  heart,  which  reveals  his  love  and  longing 
for  the  person  of  his  adored  Master. 


332  THE    TEACHER 

Gunkel's  objection  to  Pfleiderer's  view  that  the  apostle's 
doctrine  of  the  Spirit  arose  under  the  influence  of  his  doc- 
trine of  Christ  does  not  appear  to  be  well  taken.  Is  it  not 
rather  true  that  to  the  revelation  of  the  Son  of  God  in  him 
and  to  his  subsequent  sense  of  union  with  him  in  a  fellow- 
ship of  quickening  and  of  ''  life  "  are  due  the  depth  and  in- 
wardness of  his  conception  of  the  Spirit?  This  appears 
to  be  more  in  accordance  with  the  facts  than  Gunkel's 
opinion  that  Paul's  doctrine  of  Christ  was  his  "  peculiar 
expression  of  what  he  asserts  in  the  doctrine  of  the  Spirit 
in  dependence  on  the  views  of  the  church  ;  "  indeed  this 
scholar  himself  declares  that  the  apostle's  ''doctrine  of 
Christ  lay  nearer  to  his  heart  "  than  the  other,  that  for  the 
primitive  Christians  "in  the  Spirit"  meant  *'in  ecstasy," 
while  for  Paul  it  meant  "  in  the  divine  life-giving  power," 
and  that  to  the  apostle  the  highest  expression  of  his  expe- 
rience is,  '*in  Christ." 

It  is  an  interesting  feature  of  the  Pauline  doctrine  of 
the  Spirit  that  in  its  possession  man  is  in  the  tender  and 
beautiful  relation  of  sonship.  This  is  expressly  declared 
in  the  words,  "  For  as  many  as  are  led  by  the  Spirit  of 
God,  they  are  the  sons  of  God  "  (Rom.  viii.  14).  This 
condition  is  designated  as  one  of  "glorious  liberty,"  for 
which  "the  creation"  sighs  in  its  "bondage  of  corrup- 
tion" (verses  21  f.).  If,  according  to  the  Jewish  theology, 
even  the  righteous  man  lived  in  no  full  security,  and  could 
not  free  himself  from  the  fear  of  the  day  of  judgment,  how 
much  more  must  the  sinner  be  tormented  by  the  "  fearful 
looking  for  "  of  the  impending  retribution.  But  the  law 
having  been  done  away  in  Christ,  the  believer  is  delivered 
from  this  servile  fear.  "Ye  have  not  received  the  spirit 
of  bondage  again  to  fear,  but  ye  have  received  the  Spirit 
of  adoption  as  sons,  whereby  we  cry,  Abba,  Father" 
(verse    15).     By  the    expression,   "Spirit    of   adoption    as 


SUPERNATURALISM—THE   SPIRIT  333 

sons  "  (irpevfia  vLoOeala^)  the  apostle  does  not  mean  that 
the  Spirit  is  the  agency  through  which  the  ''adoption  as 
sons"  is  effected,  but  rather  that  the  Spirit  which  the  be- 
lievers have  received  is  one  that  is  adapted  to  sonship  or 
corresponds  with  this  spiritual  condition,  just  as  in  Gal. 
iv.  6  he  says  :  "  Because  ye  are  sons  God  hath  sent  forth 
the  Spirit  of  His  Son  into  your  hearts,  crying,  Abba, 
Father."  Here  the  previous  sonship  is  the  condition  of 
the  sending  forth  of  the  Spirit.  This  agrees  with  the 
passage  quoted  above  to  the  effect  that  the  being  "led 
by  the  Spirit  "  is  a  token  of  sonship.  The  condition  of 
sonship  is  conceived  as  having  been  attained  before  the 
endowment  with  the  Spirit  is  vouchsafed,  and  as  to  the 
method  of  its  attainment  the  apostle  leaves  no  doubt 
when  he  says  :  "  But  when  the  fulness  of  the  time  was 
come  God  sent  forth  His  Son  ...  to  redeem  them  that 
were  under  the  law,  that  we  might  receive  the  adoption  as 
sons  "  (Gal.  iv.  4  f.). 

This  is  the  divine  procedure,  and  man's  part  in  the  trans- 
action is  defined  with  equal  precision  in  the  words,  "  For 
ye  are  all  children  of  God  by  faith  in  Jesus  Christ,  for  as 
many  of  you  as  have  been  baptized  into  Christ  have  put 
on  Christ"  (Gal.  iii.  25  f.).  This  is  the  sonship  of  the 
Christian  dispensation,  and  not  the  "adoption"  which 
pertained  to  the  Jews  (Rom.  ix.  4).  The  supernaturalism 
which  in  the  apostle's  teaching  conditions  the  relation  of 
the  beUever  to  God  is  here  again  apparent.  The  powers 
of  the  supersensible  world  descend  upon  the  earthly  scene 
at  "the  time  appointed  of  the  Father"  (Gal.  iv.  2).  "The 
second  man,  the  Lord  from  heaven,"  the  "quickening 
Spirit,"  is  the  divinely  appointed  agent,  who  first  by  his 
death  on  the  cross  abrogates  the  law,  and  buys  man  off 
from  its  curse,  and  who  then,  on  condition  of  faith,  takes 
up  his  abode  in  him  as  a  sanctifying  power.     Man's  son- 


334 


THE    TEACHER 


ship  is,  then,  according  to  the  apostle's  thought,  not  a 
natural,  but  a  supernatural  relationship  to  God.  It  is  not 
a  natural  birthright,  but  a  supernatural  new  birthright, 
which  belongs  to  a  marvellous  scheme  of  atonement  and 
faith.  It  would,  moreover,  be  a  gross  misinterpretation 
of  Paul  to  understand  him  to  teach  that  Christ's  miracu- 
lous mission  secured  sonship  for  all  men  unconditionally, 
so  that  good  and  bad  alike  can  be  regarded  as  received 
into  this  blessed  relationship.  Only  *'  as  many  are  sons 
of  God  as  are  led  by  the  Spirit  of  God,"  and  the  Spirit 
is  vouchsafed  only  to  those  who  in  faith  and  baptism  have 
"  put  on  Christ "  and  become  ''a  new  creation." 

The  recognition  by  Paul  of  the  primitive-Christian  ecstasy 
in  connection  with  the  operations  of  the  Spirit  is  wojthy  of 
note.  In  one  of  the  passages  above  referred  to  he  says  that 
the  believers  cry  out  in  the  Spirit,  '*  Abba,  Father,"  and  in 
another  that  the  Spirit  itself  utters  this  cry  (Rom.  viii.  15  ; 
Gal.  iv.  6).  If  with  Gunkel  we  construe  in  Rom.  viii.  the 
sixteenth  verse  with  the  preceding,  the  cry  is  a  witness  of 
the  Spirit  that  the  believers  are  the  sons  of  God.  From 
the  way  in  which  it  is  introduced  here  we  may  infer  that 
it  was  an  exclamation  often  heard  among  the  Christians, 
that  it  was  well  known  to  them,  and  that  it  was  a  phenom- 
enon which  belonged  to  the  ecstatic  expressions  whereby 
the  supernatural  presence  and  operations  of  the  Spirit 
were  manifested.  Similar  if  not  the  same  is  the  ecstasy 
referred  to  in  i  Cor.  xiv.  14,  where  the  apostle  discusses 
the  speaking  with  tongues  :  ''  For  if  I  pray  in  an  unknown 
tongue  [literally,  *in  a  tongue']  my  Spirit  prayeth,  but  my 
understanding  is  unfruitful."  Here  "my  Spirit"  is  doubt- 
less the  divine  Spirit,  which,  being  for  the  time  in  the 
possession  of  the  believer,  is  called  his,  according  to  the 
following  verse  :  *'  I  will  pray  with  the  Spirit,  and  I  will 
pray  with   the  understanding  also."     In  like  manner  the 


SUPERNATURALISM—THE   SPIRIT  335 

apostle  represents  the  Spirit  as  helping  the  infirmities  of 
the  believers:  ''For  we  know  not  what  we  should  pray 
for  as  we  ought ;  but  the  Spirit  itself  maketh  intercession 
for  us  with  groanings  that  cannot  be  uttered "  (Rom. 
viii.  26).  From  the  supernaturalistic  point  of  view  of 
Paul  and  his  contemporaries  these  groanings,  inexpres- 
sible in  words  {areva'yfJLol  aXaXrjToi),  were  not  thought  to 
be  produced  by  those  who  uttered  them  in  loud  cries,  but 
were  regarded  as  expressions  of  the  Spirit,  which  wrought 
in  them,  "helping"  and  "interceding."* 

The  relation  of  the  supernatural  "life"  bestowed  in  the 
gift  of  the  Spirit  to  the  "inheritance"  of  the  believer  in 
the  Messianic  age  or  in  the  life  to  come  is  of  so  much  im- 
portance in  the  apostle's  teaching  as  to  deserve  more  than 
the  reference  to  it  already  made  in  this  discussion.  The 
"inheritance"  which  was  promised  to  Abraham  (the  land 
of  Canaan)  was  interpreted  allegorically  by  the  Jewish 
theologians  as  referring  to  the  Messianic  world-dominion, 
and  Paul  understands  by  it  the  blessedness  of  the  Chris- 
tians in  the  kingdom  soon  to  be  established  at  the  second 
coming  of  Christ  (Rom.  iv.  13;  Gal.  iii.  18,  29,  v.  21). 
To  him  the  present  possession  of  the  Spirit  and  the  future 
participation  in  the  glory  of  the  kingdom  were  so  related 
that  the  latter  was  only  a  continuation  of  the  former.  The 
Christian  now  has  "the  firstfruits  of  the  Spirit,"  and  his 

*"  Maketh  intercession"  (vTrepevTvyx^^^i-)  does  not  denote  a  pleading 
before  God  for  the  believers  on  account  of  their  sins.  Theoretically  Paul  did 
not  recognise  them  as  sinners  (see  note  on  p.  366).  The  intercession  is  not 
conceived  as  before  God  in  heaven,  but  as  a  praying  of  the  Spirit  within  the 
believers,  who  cannot  give  an  articulate  expression  to  their  inward  state. 
Hence  the  unutterable  groanings  which  suggest  the  phenomenon  of  "  speak- 
ing with  a  tongue."  Lipsius  regards  this  presence  of  the  Spirit  as  an  assur- 
ance to  the  Christians  of  the  future  fulfilment  of  their  hope.  A  similar  office 
is  ascribed  to  Christ  in  Rom.  viii.  34.  The  "  intercession  "  of  Christ  as  the  great 
high-priest  in  Heb.  vii.  25  is  conceived  as  for  the  salvation  of  the  believers.  The 
point  of  view  is  here  manifestly  different. 


336  THE    TEACHER 

"adoption  as  son"  is  in  this  life  only  preliminary  to  the 
full  fruition,  and  the  complete  ''adoption"  will  be  consum- 
mated in  the  age  to  come  in  *'the  redemption  of  his  body  " 
(Rom.  viii.  23).  In  "this  earthly  tabernacle  we  groan 
.  .  .  that  we  would  be  clothed  upon  [with  the  new  spiritual 
body]  that  mortality  might  be  swallowed  up  of  life."  "  God 
who  has  wrought  [prepared]  us  for  this  [the  spiritual  cloth- 
ing upon]  hath  given  us  the  earnest  [pledge]  of  the  Spirit  " 
(2  Cor.  V.  4,  5).  Thus  the  present  possession  of  the  Spirit 
is  an  assurance  of  a  still  greater  miracle  or  of  a  continua- 
tion of  the  miraculous  dispensation  in  the  "  glory  "  (So^a) 
of  the  coming  kingdom.  In  that  consummation  the  Spirit 
would  signalise  its  complete  triumph  over  the  flesh  in  pro- 
viding for  the  believer  in  the  place  of  the  earthly  taberna- 
cle a  "body  of  glory  "  conformed"  to  that  of  the  resurrected 
Lord  (Phil.  iii.  21). 

Accordingly,  Paul  writes  to  the  Romans  :  "  If  the  Spirit 
of  Him  that  raised  up  Jesus  from  the  dead  dwell  in  you, 
He  .  .  .  shall  also  quicken  your  mortal  bodies  by  His  Spirit 
that  dwelleth  in  you  "  (Rom.  viii.  11).  If  the  other  well- 
attested  reading,  "  on  account  of  His  Spirit  dwelling  in  you," 
be  adopted,  the  reason  for  the  transformation,  that  is,  the 
resurrection  of  spiritual  bodies,  is  expressed  instead  of  the 
indwelling  efficient  cause.  The  "adoption  as  sons"  which 
the  Christians  have  received,  and  to  which  the  Spirit 
"beareth  witness,"  renders  them  "heirs  of  God  and  joint- 
heirs  with  Christ,"  for  since  they  suffer  together,  they  will 
also  be  glorified  together  in  the  Parousia  with  a  glory  with 
which  "  the  sufferings  of  this  present  time  are  not  worthy 
to  be  compared"  (Rom.  viii.  15-17). 

"Spirit"  and  "inheritance"  belong  together,  and  it  is 
not  strictly  accurate  to  say  as  Gunkel  does  that  "  the  former 
is  the  present  and  the  latter  the  future  participation  in  the 
kingdom  of  God,"  or  with  Wendt  that  "the  Spirit  is  the 


SUPERNATURALISM—  THE   SPIRIT  337 

power  of  supernatural  life  in  the  heavenly  state  of  exist- 
ence." The  Spirit  as  a  present  possession  is  a  "pledge" 
of  a  future  in  which  its  glory  will  have  a  fuller  manifesta- 
tion. It  dominates  both  states  of  existence  for  the  believer, 
giving  him  "■  righteousness,  peace,  and  joy,"  in  which  the 
kingdom  of  God  consists,  and  destined  there  to  disclose 
things  that  eye  hath  not  seen,  or  ear  heard.  He  who  has 
the  Spirit  has  a  ''life  "  which  in  its  nature  is  imperishable. 
Death  has  no  longer  dominion  over  him,  and  whether  he 
die  physically  before  the  advent  of  the  Lord,  or  survive 
that  event,  he  is  in  any  case  certain  to  have  for  his  new 
existence  the  spiritual  body  which,  like  that  of  the  resur- 
rected Jesus,  will  denote  his  triumph  over  the  grave  (i  Cor. 
XV.  50-54;  I  Thess.  iv.  13-18).  It  is  true  that  Paul  some- 
times speaks  of  the  eternal  life  as  simply  a  future  possession 
(Rom.  ii.  7,  V.  21,  vi.  22  f.  ;  Gal.  vi.  8  ;  2  Cor.  v.  4),  but  had 
he  seen  no  deeper  than  this,  he  would  not  have  transcended 
his  age,  and  given  to  the  world  his  most  fruitful  interpreta- 
tion of  the  gospel,  that  eternal  life  is  inseparable  from  walk- 
ing in  the  Spirit  (Rom.  viii.  12  ;  Gal.  vi.  8). 

What,  then,  is  this  Spirit,  which  in  the  primitive  church 
was  regarded  as  taking  such  violent  and  compelling  posses- 
sion of  the  believers,  and  which  in  Paul's  doctrine  domi- 
nates the  entire  scheme  of  salvation,  bears  such  blessed 
fruit  of  good  works  (Gal.  v.  22  f.),  and  is  a  ''pledge  "  of  the 
participation  of  those  in  whom  it  abides  in  the  impending 
kingdom  of  God  .-*  The  apostle  himself  has  not  attempted 
to  define  it,  and  it  would  be  hazardous  for  his  students  to 
venture  where  he  did  not  presume  to  go.  That  it  was  a 
power  from  God  bestowed  upon  those  who  had  faith  in 
Jesus;  that  it  witnessed  to  their  adoption  as  sons  ;  that  it 
gave  "  life  " — the  moral-religious  and  the  eternal  life  ;  that 
through  it  the  love  of  God  was  shed  abroad  upon  the  hearts 
of  the  Christians  ;  that  it  would  assure  to  its  possessors  a 
z 


338  THE    TEACHER 

spiritual  body  of  glory  when  their  Lord  should  descend  with 
his  angels  at  the  Parousia  ;  and  that  it  so  abounded  in  Jesus 
that  "Spirit"  and  "the  Lord"  were  conceived  as  inter- 
changeable terms, —  all  this  and  much  more  we  have  learned 
from  Paul.  But  as  we  cannot  define  God  or  life,  so  we 
have  no  data  for  a  definition  of  this  subtle  agency.  The 
apostle  sometimes  speaks  of  it  as  if  he  meant  to  ascribe 
personality  to  it,  as  when  he  says  it  "  witnesses  "  with  the 
human  spirit,  represents  man  before  God,  distributes  gifts, 
and  searches  the  deep  things  of  God  (Rom.  viii.  i6,  26 ; 
I  Cor.  xii.  II,  ii.  10.)  But  that  he  cannot  have  conceived  it 
to  be  a  personality  distinct  from  God  and  Jesus  is  certain, 
for  he  declares  Jesus  to  be  the  Spirit,  makes  no  distinction 
between  the  indwelling  in  the  believer  of  Christ  and  of  the 
Spirit,  and  says  that  amidst  the  diversities  of  the  operations 
of  the  Spirit  it  is  "  the  same  God  who  worketh  all  in  all " 
(i  Cor.  xii.  6).  That  it  is  designated  as  "of  God  "  and  "of 
Christ "  denotes  that  it  was  neither  the  one  nor  the  other, 
but  rather  implies  that  it  was  a  force  which  both  could  em- 
ploy. May  it  have  been  conceived  as  the  element  in  which 
God  dwells,  the  hol^a  (glory,  effulgence)  which  surrounds 
Him  (Ex.  xxiv.  16  f.),  perhaps  a  supersensible,  fine  materi- 
ality, according  to  the  original  word,  "  breath,"  "  wind  " — a 
glory  which  Paul  regarded  as  communicated  to  the  counte- 
nance of  Moses  (2  Cor.  iii.  7),  and  which  in  his  visions  he  may 
have  seen  on  "  the  face  of  Jesus  Christ  "  (2  Cor.  iv.  6)}  * 

*  In  I  Cor.  xii.  4-6  Spirit,  Lord  (Christ),  and  God  are  mentioned  in  succes- 
sion, but  manifestly  not  as  a  "  trinity  "  in  the  "  immanent  "  sense;  for  in  verses 
10  and  II  the  "operations"  of  verse  6  are  ascribed  to  the  Spirit.  The  only 
trinity  in  the  case  is  one  of  manifestation.  In  2  Cor.  xiii.  14  occurs  a 
similar  succession  of  Christ,  God,  and  the  Spirit  ;  but  here  there  is  no 
thought  of  a  "  coordination  "  of  three  personalities  constituting  a  trinity.  Such 
a  conception  cannot  be  reconciled  with  the  apostle's  frequent  subordination  of 
Christ  to  God  and  his  identification  of  him  with  the  Spirit  (see  I  Cor.  iii.  23, 
viii.  6,  xi.  3,  xv.  28;   2  Cor.  iii.  17).     In  Rom.  viii.  9-11  the  Spirit  is  introduced 


SUPERNATURAUSM—THE   SPIRIT  339 

The  ''  spiritual  body  "  of  the  resurrection-state  was  con- 
ceived as  ''conformed  to  the  body  of  glory,"  which  Paul  sup- 
posed Christ  to  have  in  heaven,  and  he  speaks  of  a  gradual 
transformation  "into  the  same  image  from  glory  to  glory" 
(2  Cor.  iii.  18)  from  the  successive  "beholdings  of  the  glory 
of  the  Lord,"  as  if,  according  to  Schmiedel,  he  may  have 
believed  in  mysterious  preliminary  grades  of  the  eschato- 
logical  glorifying,  physically  effected  through  the  indwelling 
Spirit  in  connection  with  the  repeated  visions  of  the  Christ- 
manifestations.  But  however  the  question  of  the  materi- 
ality of  the  spiritual  substance  may  be  decided,  and  it  cannot 
be  dogmatically  determined,  it  is  evident  that  Paul  was  in 
accord  with  the  Old  Testament  and  the  later  Jewish  con- 
ception in  the  idea  that  exceptional  and  marvellous  perform- 
ances which  were  beyond  ordinary  human  power  were 
attributed  to  a  Spirit  sent  forth  by  God,  although  he  differs 
from  the  earlier  view  in  limiting  the  supernatural  agency  of 
the  Spirit  to  the  concerns  of  the  religious  life.  The  root- 
idea  seems  to  have  been  that  certain  spirit-forces  were  at 
the  divine  disposal  designated  as  Spirits  of  lying,  of  blind- 
ness, of  courage,  of  wisdom,  for  instance,  which  might  be 
''  sent  forth  "  to  accomplish  a  desired  end.  God  sends  "  an 
evil  Spirit,"  "the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  departs  from"  a  man, 
and  "an  evil  Spirit  from  the  Lord  troubles"  him  (Judg.  ix. 
23  ;  I  Sam.  xvi.  14-16,  23,  xviii.  10).  The  prophets  ascribe 
their  message,  which  they  conceived  to  be  supernatural,  to 
the  Spirit  of  Yahweh.  In  i  Kings  xxii.  21  a  personified 
evil  Spirit  "  comes  forth  and  stands  before  Yahweh,"  and 
offers  to  go  as  "a  lying  Spirit"  to  Ahab's  prophets.  In 
these  cases  a  discrimination  is  manifest  between  the  Spirit- 
first  as  of  God,  then  as  of  Christ,  and  again  as  of  God,  while  in  the  immediate 
connection  Christ  is  mentioned  as  signifying  the  same  indwelling  and  effective 
agency,  in  accordance  with  the  declaration :  "  The  Lord  [Christ]  is  that 
Spirit"  (2  Cor.  iii.  17). 


340  THE   TEACHER 

agencies  and  God  Himself.  They  are  supernatural  powers 
which  He  may  command. 

Paul's  conception  of  the  Spirit  appears  to  have  had  its 
root  in  the  Old  Testament  idea,  and  like  the  Hebrew 
writers  he  speaks  of  this  superhuman  power  as  "of  God" 
and  as  **sent  forth"  by  Him.*  If  he  thought  with  the 
fourth  evangelist  that  *' God  is  Spirit,"  he  does  not  say  so, 
and  certainly  not  that  God  is  ''the  Spirit"  {to  irvevyud). 
When  he  declares  that  Christ  "is  that  Spirit"  he  does  not 
intend  to  identify  two  personalities.  It  must  remain  un- 
certain whether  he  conceived  of  "Spirit"  in  the  abstract 
as  an  indefinite  power,  a  diffused  celestial  ^6^a  or  glory  of 
God,  which  could  be  intensified  into  an  agency  or  agencies 
bordering  on  personality,  and  sent  forth  as  "  the  Spirit  " 
on  its  ministry  to  man.  The  main  consideration  is  that 
he  transformed  the  crude,  popular,  primitive-Christian 
supernaturalism  in  its  relation  to  the  Spirit  into  a  profound 
spiritual  supernaturalism  whereby  the  entire  religious  and 
ethical  life  of  the  believer  was  brought  into  living  relation 
to  God  and  mystic  fellowship  with  Christ. 

He  does  not  think  the  thought  of  Paul  who  does  not  see 
the  powers  of  the  supersensible  world  taking  a  controlling- 
part  in  the  spiritual  fortunes  of  men,  who  does  not  recog- 
nise a  supernatural  atonement,  a  heavenly  Christ,  and  a 

*  Paul's  conception  of  the  transcendence  of  the  Spirit,  shown  in  his  employ- 
ment of  the  word  with  reference  to  man  only  in  cases  of  necessity,  and  in  his 
referring  it  to  God  in  91  out  of  the  103  passages  in  which  the  word  occurs, 
leads  Holsten  to  the  conclusion  that  his  thought  was  here  as  in  some  other 
matters  determined  by  other  than  Jewish  influences.  "  This  idea  of  the  essence 
of  TTveu/xa  [that  of  its  transcendence],  which  is  not  explicable  out  of  the 
Jewish  consciousness,  and  the  sharp  antithesis  thereby  produced  of  the  nature 
of  God  and  man,  [the  opposition  of]  Trvev/xa  and  crdp^,  which  dominated 
Paul's  thought,  cannot  be  otherwise  explained  than  out  of  the  influence  of  the 
Hellenistic  dualism  of  spirit  and  matter  upon  his  thinking.  But  we  must  not 
fail  to  recognise  the  fact  that  a  religious  requirement,  that  of  the  necessity  of 
sin,  urged  him  to  the  adoption  of  this  dualism."  —  Pie  paulin.  77ieol.  p.  38. 


S  U PERN  A  T  URALISM  —  THE   SPIRI T  3  4 1 

Spirit  whose  operations  dispense  with  the  laws  of  moral 
and  religious  growth.  It  has  been  the  fortune  of  this  doc- 
trine to  be  transformed  in  order  to  meet  the  varying  phases 
of  human  thought.  We  are  now  in  the  midst  of  one  of  these 
transformations.  A  fellowship  with  Christ  which  is  ethi- 
cal instead  of  supernatural,  an  atonement  which  is  only  a 
reconciliation,  a  baptism  which  is  a  mere  outward  form,  an 
eschatology  which  is  an  historical  evolution  without  a  catas- 
trophic dmoument,  and  a  Spirit  which  works  according  to 
law  constitute  an  emasculated  Paulinism.  The  indomitable 
tendency  of  modern  thought  toward  these  ideas  denotes 
our  departure  from  the  greatest  of  the  apostles,  and  indi- 
cates the  transient  elements  in  a  teaching  which  for  ages 
swayed  the  thought  of  Christendom. 


CHAPTER   XIV 

FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION 

THE  objective  condition  of  salvation  according  to  Paul's 
apprehension  of  it  was  furnished  in  the  atonement  of 
Christ,  and  is  summarily  expressed  in  the  declaration  that 
"  Christ  is  the  end  of  the  law  for  righteousness  to  every 
one  that  believeth  "  (Rom.  x.  4).  The  ''end  of  the  law" 
signifies  neither  its  purpose  nor  its  fulfilment,  but  its 
abrogation  as  a  way  of  salvation  or  as  a  means  of  attaining 
righteousness.  The  apostle  lays  down  no  doctrine  with 
more  explicitness  and  emphasis  than  this  one  that  right- 
eousness is  unattainable  by  man's  own  endeavour  to  fulfil 
the  law  (Gal.  ii.  16,  iii.  10),  and  that  *'if  righteousness 
come  by  the  law,  then  Christ  is  dead  in  vain,"  and  "is 
become  of  no  effect"  (Gal.  ii.  21,  v.  4).  The  righteousness 
that  is  by  the  law  and  the  righteousness  that  is  by  faith 
are  placed  over  against  each  other  as  mutually  exclusive. 
There  is  no  combination  of  the  two.  The  former  is 
impossible,  for  *'by  the  works  of  the  law  shall  no  flesh  be 
justified,"  and  accordingly  there  remains  only  the  latter. 
A  combination  of  the  two  methods  is  not  implied  in  Rom. 
viii.  4,  "That  the  righteousness  of  the  law  might  be 
fulfilled  in  us  who  walk  not  after  the  flesh  but  after  the 
Spirit."  For  this  righteousness  which  the  law  requires, 
that  is,  the  right  moral-religious  life,  is  here  represented 
as  something  which  "the  law  could  not  effect"  (verse  3), 
and  which  is  made  possible  only  through  the  sacrifice  of 
Christ,    in   whose   death   the    sentence    of    condemnation 

342 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  343 

against  sin  was  executed.  In  their  fellowship  with  his 
death  the  flesh  is  slain  for  the  believers  also,  and  the 
righteousness  of  the  law  can  be  fulfilled  by  them  only 
because  they  "  walk  not  after  the  flesh  but  after  the 
Spirit,"  that  is,  through  receiving  the  atonement  by  faith 
they  have  come  into  an  entirely  new  relation  to  God,  in 
which  they  are  "free  from  the  law  of  sin  and  death,"  and 
under  ''the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life  in  Christ  Jesus." 
What  they  could  not  do  before  they  can  do  now  by  means 
of  what  God  has  graciously  effected  for  them  through 
Christ.  Their  righteousness  is  not  now  by  the  law,  but 
by  faith,  through  which  alone  according  to  the  apostle's 
thought  salvation  can  be  acquired,  and  which  is  its  sub- 
jective condition,  man's  part  in  its  consummation,  just  as 
God's  part  was  the  offering  of  the  atonement.  In  this 
original  conception,  which  is  a  striking  manifestation  of 
the  apostle's  religious  genius,  is  presented  not  only  a  new 
religion  in  contrast  with  Judaism,  but  also  a  new  Christi- 
anity in  contrast  with  the  Christianity  of  the  twelve 
apostles  and  the  Jewish  Christians  in  general.  Their 
righteousness  was  that  of  the  law  with  Christ,  Paul's  was 
that  of  God  through  Christ  without  the  law.  To  them 
Christ  was  a  means  of  reforming  and  fulfilling  the  law, 
while  to  Paul  he  was  the  ''end"  of  it,  and  in  him  it  was 
abrogated  as  a  way  of  attaining  righteousness. 

In  the  apostle's  declaration  that  "  if  righteousness  come 
by  the  law,  then  Christ  is  dead  in  vain,"  the  importance 
of  the  subjective  condition  of  salvation  is  manifest.  The 
proffered  grace  of  God,  the  atonement,  the  dying  of  Christ 
to  the  law,  to  sin,  and  to  the  flesh,  must  all  be  ineffectual, 
if  men  continue  in  the  old  way  to  seek  salvation  by  the 
fruitless  attempt  to  fulfil  the  law.  The  grace  that  is 
offered,  the  atonement  that  is  provided,  must  be  "re- 
ceived,"  or   they  are  "in   vain."     The    reception  of   the 


344  THE    TEACHER 

gracious  offer  of  God,  its  appropriation,  is  conditioned 
upon  a  receptive  state  of  mind  which  the  apostle  des- 
ignates as  faith  (TTicrri?),  and  to  be  in  the  right  attitude 
toward  it  is  to  believe  {TnaTeveiv).  The  grand  idea  is 
confidence,  trust  in  God,  and  especially  in  Him  as  the 
author  of  the  new  dispensation  of  grace  in  Christ. 
Accordingly,  it  is  set  over  against  ** sight"  or  knowledge: 
''  For  we  walk  by  faith,  not  by  sight "  (2  Cor.  v.  7).  It  is 
not  founded  upon  such  a  conviction  as  may  proceed  from 
experience  and  a  wide  acquaintance  with  the  world.  Paul 
tells  the  Corinthians  that  his  preaching  to  them  had  not 
been  "with  enticing  words  of  man's  wisdom,  but  in 
demonstration  of  the  Spirit  and  of  power,"  that  is,  that 
God  had  wrought  in  him  with  a  super-earthly  power ;  and 
this  was  to  the  end  that  their  "faith  should  not  stand  in 
the  wisdom  of  men,  but  in  the  power  of  God  "  (i  Cor.  ii.  5). 
Its  support  should  not  be  in  the  knowledge  which  is  of 
this  world,  but  in  the  divine  power  manifested  in  the  plan 
of  redemption  and  in  the  religious  life  of  the  believer,  as  it 
was  animated  by  the  Spirit.  Faith  is  trust  in  God  in  the 
face  of  and  against  the  natural  and  probable,  as  in  the  case 
of  Abraham  with  reference  to  the  birth  of  a  child  in  the 
old  age  of  himself  and  his  wife  —  a  faith  that  was  "against 
hope  in  hope."  He  cast  himself  upon  "the  promise  of 
God,"  and  was  "fully  persuaded  that  what  He  promised 
He  was  able  to  perform."  This  faith  "was  imputed  to  him 
for  righteousness"  (Rom.  iv.  18,  21,  22).  The  religious 
character  of  faith  as  Paul  apprehended  it  is  thus  manifest. 
God  is  the  object  of  it.  It  is  confidence  in  His  promises, 
and  from  the  specifically  Christian  point  of  view  con- 
fidence in  the  plan  of  redemption  consummated  by  the 
death  of  Christ  as  an  atoning  sacrifice  and  by  his  resur- 
rection and  ascension  to  glory,  whereby  he  received  the 
authentication  of  his  mission  from  the  Father.      In  other 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  345 

words,  it  is  not  a  belief  in  a  course  of  things  naturally  to 
be  expected  according  to  the  usual  order,  but  confidence 
in  a  consummation  which  one  might  regard  as  ''against 
hope,"  that  is,  in  a  supernatural  'Mife  "  and  righteousness 
offered  to  man  by  the  cooperation  of  God  and  Christ  in  the 
atonement. 

The  apostle  well  says  of  such  a  faith  that  it  does  *'not 
stand  in  the  wisdom  of  men,  but  in  the  power  of  God."* 
Since  it  was  ''through  Christ"  that  the  atonement  was  ef- 
fected, it  is  natural  that  faith  should  be  directed  to  him,  and 
we  accordingly  find  "faith  of  Christ,"  "faith  unto  Christ," 
and  "faith  in  Christ,"  in  all  which  cases  is  implied  con- 
fidence in  him  as  "the  Lord,"  the  Messiah,  and  the  One 
who  is  soon  to  come  again  to  establish  the  kingdom.     But 
faith    in    him    is    subordinate   to   that   in   God,   on   whom 
depends   the    fulfilment   of   the   "prom-ise."     All   faith   is 
"vain"  if  Christ  were  not  raised  from  the  dead  (i  Cor. 
XV.  14),  and  this  crowning  miracle  of  the  whole  scheme  of 
redemption  was  the  work  of  God.     He  it  is  from  whom 
comes  the  justification  of  the  ungodly  (Rom.  iv.  5),  and  to 
Him  will  the  kingdom  at  last  be  delivered  up(i  Cor.  xv.  24). 
When  we  consider  how  near  to  the  apostle's  heart  Christ 
was,  it  is  not  surprising  that  he  connects  faith  in  him  and 
faith  in  God  in  relation  to  the  atonement.     It  was  in  the 
revelation  of  Christ  in  him  that  his  conversion  consisted, 
and  his  heart  went  out  to  Jesus  in  grateful  love  on  account 
of  the  great  sacrifice  whereby  he  had  been  delivered  from 
the  bondage  of  the  law.     Accordingly,  he  coordinates  the 
"confession"  of  the  Lord  Jesus  with  faith  in  the  fact  that 
God  had  raised  him  from  the  dead  as  the  two  conditions  of 
salvation  (Rom.  x.  9),  and  the  love  of  Christ  and  the  love 
of  God  are  mentioned  in  connection  with  each  other  as  a 
boon  from  which  nothing  can  separate  the  believers  (Rom. 
viii-  35.  39)- 


346  THE    TEACHER 

While  the  great  historical  events  which  to  the  apostle 
were  fundamental,  that  Christ  came  into  the  world  as  the 
second  Adam  for  a  work  of  redemption,  that  in  order  to 
accomplish  this  work  he  was  crucified,  and  that  in  attesta- 
tion of  the  divine  character  of  his  person  and  mission  God 
raised  him  from  the  dead,  must  be  believed  as  the  basis  of 
faith  in  its  profounder  significance,  still  Paul  did  not  stop 
in  his  interpretation  of  faith  with  these  external  facts.  For 
him  there  was  a  deeper,  a  more  inward  faith  which  touched 
the  springs  of  conduct,  and  produced  the  highest  order  of 
life.  Accordingly,  he  speaks  of  a  faith  that  is  ''  unto  right- 
eousness," and  says  that  this  is  a  believing  "  with  the 
heart "  (Rom.  x.  lo).  The  historical  fact  of  the  resurrec- 
tion of  Christ  may  be  so  apprehended,  and  such  an  appre- 
hension of  it  assures  salvation  (verse  9)  in  connection 
with  an  open  confession  of  belief  in  Jesus  as  "Lord." 
Emphasis  is  laid  upon  the  resurrection,  not  because  in  the 
apostle's  doctrine  of  the  atonement  it  took  precedence 
over  the  death  of  Christ,  but  because  it  was  the  conspicu- 
ous event  without  which  he  would  have  appeared  in  his 
death  to  have  been  abandoned  of  God  and  hence  not  to 
have  been  the  true  Son  and  Messiah.  Under  this  condi- 
tion he  could  not  have  been  at  all  an  object  of  faith,  there 
would  have  been  in  fact  no  atonement,  and  men  would 
have  been  still  in  their  sins  (i  Cor.  xv.  17).  The  faith 
which  is  ''unto  righteousness"  is,  then,  of  the  heart  (/ca/)- 
8ta),  and  is  something  more  than  intellectual  assent  to 
outward  facts.  It  is  the  opening  of  the  inmost  being  to 
the  reception  of  the  salvation  provided  through  the  love 
of  God  and  of  Christ  for  men.  It  is  a  response  of  the 
sentiments  to  this  gracious  offer  from  the  open  heaven, 
and  there  go  with  it  joy,  gratitude,  love,  and  an  eager 
acceptance  of  the  great  boon  from  the  heart  of  God. 

In  the  recognition  of  Christ  as  Lord  is  implied  an  ac- 


FAITH  AND  JUST  I  PICA  TION  347 

knowledgment  of  his  authority.  Accordingly,  there  goes 
with  faith  the  idea  of  subjection  in  the  good  sense,  that 
is,  of  glad  and  grateful  obedience  as  to  one  who  com- 
mands the  heart,  and  sways  the  will  by  love.  Submis- 
sion to  "the  righteousness  of  God  "  (Rom.  x.  3),  mentioned 
in  contrast  with  the  futile  attempt  to  establish  one's  own 
righteousness  by  works,  is  the  equivalent  of  faith.  A 
similar  attitude  is  implied  in  the  ''bringing  into  captivity 
of  every  thought  to  the  obedience  of  Christ "  (2  Cor.  x.  5). 
Pfleiderer's  discrimination  should,  however,  here  be  noted, 
that  the  obedience  in  question  is  not  to  be  regarded 
as  the  ethical  disposition  and  effort  to  fulfil  the  law,  for 
this  is  opposed  to  the  apostle's  doctrine  of  justification 
by  faith,  but  as  a  devotion  in  absolute  self-renunciation  to 
the  gracious  divine  will,  in  contradistinction  to  the  seek- 
ing of  one's  own  righteousness  and  having  "confidence 
in  the  flesh "  (Phil.  iii.  4).  This  is  a  fulfilment  of  the 
divine  will,  but  not  of  the  will  that  commands  under  the 
law.  Rather  it  is  the  compliance  with  the  will  that  gives 
under  the  dispensation  of  grace,  and  which  demands  of 
man  nothing  but  the  trusting  acceptance  of  the  offer. 

The  Pauline  faith  is  not,  however,  a  mere  passive  ac- 
ceptance of  the  grace  of  God  in  Christ,  but  the  believer 
consecrates  himself  to  God  and  Christ,  and  henceforth 
lives  in  them  and  they  in  him.  To  be  "in  Christ"  is  to  be 
"a  new  creation."  The  former  subjection  to  the  law  of 
works  has  passed  away,  or  in  other  words  the  "old  things" 
are  no  more,  and  "all  things  have  become  new"  (2  Cor. 
v.  17).  A  new  impulse  has  been  imparted  to  the  life,  and 
with  a  sense  of  freedom,  with  gratitude,  love,  and  devotion, 
the  believer  is  conceived  as  entering  upon  a  spiritual  experi- 
ence hitherto  unknown  and  inconceivable.  No  longer  does 
he  feel  himself  alone  in  a  doubtful  conflict  with  the  flesh 
and  in  the  futile  struggle  to  keep  the  law.     No  longer  is 


348  THE    TEACHER 

God  to  him  only  a  lawgiver  and  a  judge.  Now  rather  He 
appears  to  him  as  the  gracious  One  who  out  of  love  for 
man  has  offered  the  atonement,  and  sent  Christ  to  con- 
summate it,  and  who  only  requires  faith  and  acceptance  of 
the  boon  as  the  condition  of  the  bestowal  of  His  Spirit 
and  the  adoption  of  the  believer  into  the  divine  sonship. 
That  trust  and  devotion,  love,  and  longing  for  communion, 
are  conditions  of  the  bestowal  of  the  Spirit  is  psycholog- 
ically evident,  since  God  cannot  bestow  Himself  upon  one 
who  turns  away  from  Him,  or  stands  in  a  neutral  attitude, 
that  is,  without  confidence,  affection,  and  gratitude.  Ac- 
cordingly Paul  finds  the  consummation  of  faith  to  be  an 
intimate  fellowship  of  the  believer  with  God  and  Christ. 
It  is  difficult  for  us  with  our  modes  of  thinking  to  enter 
into  the  depths  of  this  conception.  Perhaps  we  cannot  at 
all  think  and  feel  with  the  apostle  in  this  relation.  He  was 
a  mystic  in  some  of  his  deepest  moods,  and  a  mystic  alone 
can  interpret  him.  He  thinks  of  himself  as  living  in  Christ 
and  Christ  in  him,  as  if  there  were  a  blending  of  the  two 
personalities  in  a  mystic  union.  To  him  ''to  live  is  Christ" 
(Phil.  i.  2i).  So  completely  has  he  appropriated  the  entire 
life  of  Christ  that  the  latter's  experience  of  death  and 
resurrection  has  become  his.  He  is  identified  with  him  in 
the  work  of  atonement  and  in  the  new  and  glorious  life 
which  he  lives  in  his  exalted  heavenly  estate.  "Through 
the  law,"  he  says,  "  I  am  dead  to  the  law,  that  I  might  live 
unto  God,"  that  is,  by  reason  of  the  penalty  of  death  which 
the  law  adjudges  to  sin,  I  am  dead  to  the  law,  because, 
through  fellowship  with  Christ,  'T  am  crucified  with  him." 
"Nevertheless,"  he  continues,  "I  live;  yet  not  I,  but 
Christ  liveth  in  me,  and  the  life  which  I  now  live  in  the 
flesh  I  live  by  faith  in  the  Son  of  God,  who  loved  me,  and 
gave  himself  for  me  "  (Gal.  ii.  19  f.). 

This  love  and  devotion  of  Christ  call  forth  a  responsive 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  349 

affection  in  the  believer,  and  in  love  and  trust  he  is  so 
united  to  the  Saviour  that  he  can  say  :  *'He  that  is  joined 
to  the  Lord  is  one  spirit"  (i  Cor.  vi.  17).  In  baptism  the 
believer  has  ''  been  planted  together  [with  Christ]  in  the 
likeness  of  his  death,"  and  hence  may  reckon  himself  "as 
dead  to  sin"  (Rom.  vi.  5,  11).  The  possession  of  the 
Spirit  of  Christ  is  the  evidence  that  one  belongs  to  him,  or 
is  "his."  "Now  if  any  man  have  not  the  Spirit  of  Christ, 
he  is  none  of  his"  (Rom.  viii.  9).  "  Know  ye  not  your  own 
selves,  how  that  Jesus  Christ  is  in  you,  except  ye  be 
reprobates  .!^ "  (2  Cor.  xiii.  5).  The  Pauline  faith,  then,  is 
not  a  belief  in  Christ  and  God  as  external  objects  of  con- 
fidence, but  as  an  internal  principle  of  life.  The  apostle 
counts  all  things  worthless  if  only  he  "  may  win  Christ,  and 
be  found  in  him  not  having  his  own  righteousness  which  is 
of  the  law,  but  that  which  is  through  the  faith  of  Christ, 
which  is  of  God  by  faith."  He  would  "know  him  and  the 
power  of  his  resurrection  and  the  fellowship  of  his  suffer- 
ings, being  made  conformable  to  his  death  "  (Phil.  iii.  8-10). 
In  Paul's  contest  with  Peter  at  Antioch,  when  he  "with- 
stood him  to  the  face,  because  he  was  to  be  blamed  "  for 
not  "  walking  uprightly  according  to  the  truth  of  the 
gospel,"  he  laid  down  according  to  his  own  account  of  the 
matter  in  Galatians  the  principle  at  issue  between  himself 
and  the  Jewish  Christians  as  to  the  method  of  salvation 
through  Christ  in  these  terms  :  "A  man  is  not  justified  by 
the  works  of  the  law,  but  by  faith  in  Jesus  Christ ;  .  .  . 
for  by  the  works  of  the  law  shall  no  flesh  be  justified  "(Gal. 
ii.  16).*    The  word  here  rendered  "is  justified"  (Si/caiovrai) 

*  The  exact  attitude  of  Peter  toward  the  "  gospel "  of  Paul  is  involved  in 
uncertainty.  Holsten's  conjecture  that  when  Paul  first  visited  him  in  Jerusalem 
the  latter  was  in  accord  with  him  as  to  his  gospel  of  the  uncircumcision  to  the 
gentiles  is  hardly  supported  in  Gal.  i.  18-24.  How  much  Peter's  "right  hand 
of  fellowship  "  (Gal.  ii.  9)  at  the  council  denoted  we  cannot  know,  just  as  it  is 
uncertain  whether  fear  of  those  of  the  circumcision  (Gal.  ii.  12)  was  the  sole 


350  THE    TEACHER 

is  borrowed  from  the  judicial  usage,  and  signifies  primarily 
acquittal  from  guilt  by  the  decree  of  the  judge.  It  is 
accordingly  to  be  interpreted  as  a  recognition  of  the 
right  relation  of  the  subject  in  question  to  the  law  or  his 
''righteousness."  He  is  declared  to  be  righteous.  In  the 
Greek  translation  of  the  Old  Testament  the  word  is  em- 
ployed in  the  same  sense  (Deut.  xxv.  i ;  Job  xxxiii.  32;  see 
also  Matt.  xi.  29,  ''Wisdom  is  justified  of  her  children"). 
In  Paul's  usage  the  word  denotes  the  recognition  on  the 
part  of  God  that  the  man  to  whom  it  is  applied  stands  in 
the  right  religious  relation  to  Him,  is  acknowledged  and 
declared  to  be  righteous.  This  must  be  clearly  distin- 
guished from  the  process  of  rendering  one  righteous,  from 
conversion  to  or  growth  in  righteousness.  When  the 
apostle  declares  that  the  doers  of  the  law  shall  be  justified, 
he  has  not  in  mind  their  becoming  righteous  through 
obedience,  but  only  the  fact  that  their  obedience  having 
been  accomplished  they  are  therefore  regarded  as  righteous 
in  the  sight  of  God,  just  as  those  who  fail  to  keep  the  law 
will  be  judged  by  it  (Rom.  ii.  12,  13). 

This  is  one  sort  of  justification,  that  under  the  law,  but 
a  sort  that  is  not  recognised  by  the  apostle,  whose  entire 
doctrine  of  salvation  is  based  upon  the  principle  that  by 
the  works  of  the  law  justification  is  impossible.    The  sense 

motive  for  his  withdrawal  from  table-companionship  with  the  gentiles  in 
Antioch.  It  may  be  true  that  in  Peter's  gospel  there  was  "  a  certain  freedom, 
with  reference  to  the  Mosaic  law,  at  least  in  all  its  forms  of  ritual  and  worship," 
in  accordance  with  the  attitude  ascribed  to  Jesus  toward  it  in  Matt.  ix.  9-13, 
xii.  1-14,  XV.  1-20.  He  may  have  agreed  with  Paul  too  "in  the  doctrine  of 
the  death  of  the  Messiah  on  the  cross  as  an  atoning  substitutional  death  for 
sin  ";  but  the  idea  that  he  drew  from  this  Paul's  radical  conclusion  that  in  his 
death  Christ  was  "the  end  of  the  [whole]  law,"  ethical  as  well  as  ceremonial, 
Holsten  rightly  rejects  {Die  panlin.  Theol.,  p.  44).  One  loses  the  key  to  the 
understanding  of  Paul's  Epistles  the  moment  one  attempts  to  interpret  them 
from  the  point  of  view  that  his  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  was  shared  by 
the  Jewish-Christian  apostles. 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICA  TION  3  5  I 

in  which  he  employs  the  word  "justify"  is  apparent  from 
the  example  of  Abraham  (Rom.  iv.  1-5),  of  whom  he  says 
that  if  he  were  justified  by  works,  as  the  Jewish  Christians 
supposed,  he  has  whereof  to  boast.  But  Paul  denies  that 
he  had  anything  to  boast  of  before  God,  since  from  his 
point  of  view  boasting  is  excluded  (Rom.  iii.  27).  The 
Scripture,  he  declares,  says  that  Abraham  believed  God, 
and  it  was  counted  unto  him  for  righteousness.  Here 
there  is  manifestly  no  process  implied  between  the  act  of 
faith  and  the  righteousness.  The  latter  is  simply  "counted," 
reckoned  {Xo^l^eTai)  on  account  of  the  former.  The  sub- 
ject's faith  does  not  make  him  righteous,  as  if  the  relation 
were  one  of  cause  and  effect,  but  "to  him  that  worketh 
not,  but  believeth  on  Him  that  justifieth  the  ungodly,  his 
faith  is  counted  for  righteousness."  The  procedure  by 
which  the  judgment  of  righteousness  is  pronounced  is 
characterised  by  the  apostle  as  one  "of  grace."  When  a 
man  fulfils  the  law,  his  righteousness  of  works  is  somewhat 
that  he  is  entitled  to,  and  his  reward  is  "of  debt,"  while 
not  to  "impute  sin"  on  the  one  hand,  and  to  "impute 
righteousness  "  on  the  other,  are  simply  to  regard  one  as 
not  sinful  or  as  righteous  independently  of  one's  obedience 
or  disobedience  in  relation  to  the  moral  law,  and  so  to 
declare  by  a  pure  act  of  favour  or  because  one  has  had 
"faith."  The  same  word  is  employed  to  express  the 
relation  to  the  judge  in  the  case  of  a  man  who  by  arduous 
effort  may  have  fulfilled  the  law  and  in  reference  to  another 
who  "worketh  not,"  and  is  pronounced  righteous  "of 
grace"  by  Him  who  has  the  prerogative  of  pardon,  because 
of  his  faith  and  on  account  of  what  Christ  has  done  for 
him  through  the  atonement.* 

*  The  exegetical  contest  over  the  word  "justify"  (5t/cat6w)  remains  unde- 
cided. Like  all  verbs  of  its  termination  it  is  "  factitive,"  that  is,  it  denotes  the 
production  of  a  state  in  the  object.     But  in  usage  it  is  both  actually  and  logi- 


352  THE    TEACHER 

The  relation  of  the  apostle's  doctrine  of  justification  to 
certain  teachings  of  the  Jewish  theology  is  worthy  of  con- 
sideration. Although  the  Jewish  theology,  which  Weber 
has  set  forth,  is  of  later  date  so  far  as  the  documents  are 
concerned,  there  is  reason  for  believing  that  it  was  sub- 

cally  factitive,  as  Holsten  has  pointed  out.  It  is  not,  as  Dr.  McGiffert  asserts, 
of  no  importance  for  the  Pauline  usage  that  it  is  employed  in  the  latter  sense 
in  the  Septuagint  — "  to  declare  one  righteous  in  consequence  of  a  judgment." 
When  Paul  uses  it  in  connection  with  his  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith,  it 
always  has  this  meaning,  and  not  that  of  actually  rendering  one  righteous. 
The  sinner  is  on  account  of  his  faith  declared  or  reckoned  (Xo7^^eTat)  right- 
eous because  of  the  representative  atoning  death  of  Christ.  This  is  the  so-called 
"  forensic  "  or  declaratory  sense  of  the  word.  Righteousness  is  not  produced 
in  the  sinner,  but  it  is  "  reckoned  "  or  "  imputed  "  to  him  (Rom.  iii.  24,  26,  28, 
30,  iv.  5,  viii.  30,  33;  Gal.  ii.  16  f.,  iii.  8,  24).  When  the  apostle  wrote  of 
justification  by  faith  a  process  of  moral-spiritual  renewal  does  not  appear  to 
have  been  in  his  mind.  Hence  the  absence  of  all  reference  to  repentance, 
conversion,  and  forgiveness.  He  who  has  fulfilled  the  condition  of  faith  is 
theoretically  a  member  of  Christ  and  an  heir  of  the  kingdom,  whether  he  be  a 
"  Christian  "  in*  our  sense  of  the  word  or  not.  He  is  one  of  the  "  predestinated," 
and  as  such  is  "justified,"  and  by  anticipation  "glorified"  (Rom.  viii.  29 f.). 

Dr.  McGiffert's  contention  (^The  Apostolic  Age,  p.  144) that  the  non-forensic 
sense  of  Iikohovv  "  can  be  clearly  shown  in  Rom.  iv.  2-5  and  I  Cor.  vi.  1 1  "  is 
not  well  sustained.  The  words,  "  What  shall  we  say  then?  ...  if  Abraham  was 
justified  by  works  he  hath  whereof  to  boast,"  are  doubtless  an  objection  antici- 
pated from  a  Jewish  opponent.  Paul  answers  that  there  is  no  ground  for  boast- 
ing, for  the  righteousness  of  Abraham  was  "  counted  to  him  "  because  of  his  faith. 
He  says  nothing  of  Abraham's  being  viade  righteous;  and  he  does  not  contradict 
himself,  as  Dr.  McGiffert  assumes,  by  declaring  that  Abraham  really  had  ground 
for  boasting,  and  yet  had  none,  because  none  "  before  God  "  !  In  i  Cor.  vi.  1 1 : 
"  Ye  are  washed,  ye  are  sanctified,  ye  are  justified,"  etc.,  the  fact  that  "justified  " 
follows  "  washed  "  and  "  sanctified,"  and  is  connected  with  "  in  the  Spirit," 
does  not  "  make  it  very  clear  that  it  is  to  be  taken  in  the  real  and  not  in  the 
forensic  sense."  The  sanctification  of  men  of  whom  the  apostle  says  that  they 
were  "carnal"  and  envious  (i  Cor.  iii.  3)  means  only  their  setting-apart  as 
"holy,"  "elect,"  and  prospectively  members  of  the  kingdom,  and  no  more 
denotes  a  real  holiness  than  justification  denotes  in  his  usage  a  real  righteous- 
ness. We  must  distinguish  in  Paul  between  the  theoretical  objective  right- 
eousness "  imputed "  for  faith  and  the  real  subjective  righteousness  which 
experience  with  his  churches  constrained  him  to  urge  upon  them  as  an  ethical 
acquiremejit.     He  leaves  the  two  points  of  view  unreconciled.     (See  p.  366.) 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  353 

stantially  contemporaneous  with  Paul,  and  where  we  find 
striking  agreements  between  the  two  the  probabiHty  is 
much  greater  that  Paul  borrowed  from  the  Jewish  teachers 
than  that  they  borrowed  from  him.  Now  in  his  doctrine 
of  justification  as  well  as  in  that  of  the  atonement  the 
apostle  shows  striking  accords  with  the  theology  of  his 
people,  while  at  the  same  time  he  surpasses  it  by  the  bold 
flights  of  his  religious  genius.  The  Jewish  theologians 
taught,  for  example,  that  men  were  justified  or  condemned 
on  the  ground  of  their  works,  and  that  their  standing  in 
the  judgment  would  be  determined  according  to  the  pre- 
ponderance of  good  works  over  evil  or  vice  versa.  The 
teaching,  however,  which  is  of  especial  interest  to  the 
present  discussion  is  that  a  balance  in  favour  of  good 
works  found  on  settling  the  account  of  any  one  might  be 
turned  to  the  account  of  a  less  fortunate  person,  so  as  to 
cover  his  deficiency.  Thus  men  of  distinguished  piety  be- 
came representatively  righteous  for  the  people  in  accord- 
ance with  the  principle  of  solidarity  or  the  unity  of  the  tribe. 
Now  it  would  appear  that  Paul  adopted  the  representative 
idea,  that  is,  the  doctrine  of  the  imputation  of  righteous- 
ness. He  took,  however,  the  more  radical  ground  that 
righteousness  is  not  attainable  in  any  degree  by  works, 
since  the  fulfilment  of  the  law  is  impossible,  and  that 
it  is  on  principle  a  matter  of  grace.  His  anthropology 
had  an  influence  in  determining  his  position  on  this  point. 
The  flesh  with  its  impulses  to  sin  rendered  ineffective  the 
utmost  efforts  of  "the  inward  man."  A  man  might, 
indeed,  with  his  "mind"  "serve  the  law  of  God,"  but  the 
flesh,  the  fatal  law  in  the  members,  tainted,  and  rendered 
inoperative  all  his  endeavours,  so  that  he  could  not  attain 
a  real  righteousness.  His  sole  hope,  then,  lay  in  the 
destruction  of  this  power  of  sin  and  the  reckoning  to  his 
account  of  a  righteousness  not  of  his  own  achievement. 

2A 


354  ^^-^    TEACHER 

In  the  destruction  of  the  flesh  of  Christ  on  the  cross  the 
judgment  on  sin  was  executed  for  the  race  on  the  person 
of  its  representative  head,  the  old  dispensation  of  the  law- 
was  abolished,  he  was  "made  to  be  sin"  for  mankind,  and 
righteousness  was  accounted  to  them  so  far  as  they  should 
come  into  such  a  spiritual  relation  to  him  that  they  could 
be  included  in  the  religious  fellowship  from  which  they 
might  derive  advantage  according  to  the  principle  of 
solidarity.  Those  who  will  may  come  into  this  relation 
through  faith,  that  is,  through  a  sympathetic  union  and  a 
fellowship  of  spirit  and  life  with  Christ,  so  that  in  a  mystic 
sense  they  become  one  with  him,  and  participate  in  his 
death  and  resurrection.  Thus  they  derive  advantage  from 
his  sacrifice,  although  his  merits  are  not  transferred  to 
them,  as,  according  to  the  Jewish  doctrine,  the  virtues  of 
the  fathers  were  set  over  to  the  account  of  their  descend- 
ants, but  they  are  "■  made  the  righteousness  of  God  in 
him"  (2  Cor.  v.  21).*     In  this  new  life  in  Christ  not  only 

*  In  the  term  "  righteousness  of  God  "  (St/catocryj/)?  Qeov)  when  used  by  Paul 
in  connection  with  his  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  the  genitive  is  not  that 
of  possession  as  in  Rom.  iii.  5,  25,  26,  but  that  of  the  author.  "  The  righteous- 
ness of  God,"  or  that  which  He  "  imputes,"  is  set  over  against  man's  own  right- 
eousness by  works,  and  is  purely  a  matter  of  "  grace,"  a  free  gift  "  reckoned" 
to  men  on  account  of  faith  and  on  the  ground  of  the  atoning  death  of  Christ. 
Hence  it  is  said  to  be  "  by  faith,"  and  "  upon  all  them  that  believe  "  (Rom.  iii. 
22).  It  does  not  denote  a  condition  effected  by  man  through  his  own  works, 
or  produced  in  him  by  God,  and  hence  in  no  sense  a  subjective  state  or  char- 
acter. It  is  simply  an  objective  condition  in  which  God  is  pleased  "  freely  "  to 
regard  him  as  standing  through  faith  in  Christ  (Gal.  ii.  i6;  Rom.  v.  15-17). 
If  the  believer's  ideal  dying  with  Christ  to  the  flesh,  his  life  "  by  faith  "  (Gal. 
ii.  20),  and  his  possession  of  the  Spirit,  furnish  to  the  apostle  occasion  and 
ground  for  ethical  exhortation  to  "  walk  in  the  Spirit,"  and  thus  appear  to 
reheve  the  hardness  of  the  theoretically  unmoral  doctrine  of  justification,  this 
doctrine  stands  upon  an  exegetical  basis  too  firm  to  be  shaken  by  these  con- 
siderations. The  ethical  aspect  of  salvation,  as  Paul  apprehended  it,  has  no 
standing  apart  from  the  idea  of  the  atoning  death  of  Christ,  on  the  ground  of 
which  men  may  be  justified  by  faith,  and  be  "  reckoned  "  as  righteous  without 
"  their  own  righteousness." 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  355 

is  the  former  sinful  manner  of  living  done  away,  but  the 
conditions  of  it  are  removed,  and  it  is  destroyed  root  and 
branch.  Accordingly,  the  apostle  says  :  ''  If  Christ  be  in 
you,  the  body  is  dead  because  of  sin,  but  the  Spirit  is  life 
because  of  righteousness"  (Rom.  viii.  lo).  The  sentence 
of  condemnation  to  death  which  the  law  pronounced 
against  sin  rendered  it  necessary  that  the  body  should  die. 
It  must  die  *'on  account  of  sin,"  and  Paul  conceives  the 
body,  the  flesh,  of  the  believer  as  "  dead "  through  his 
participation  in  the  death  of  Christ.  But  on  the  other 
hand,  he  has  the  divine  Spirit,  which  is  ''life"  on  account 
of  the  righteousness  that  he  has  acquired  through  this 
mystic  union  with  Christ.  He  enters  too  into  a  new 
relation  with  God  by  reason  of  faith  in  Him  as  the  author 
of  the  gracious  provision  of  the  atonement,  or  more  pre- 
cisely, through  faith  in  Christ  as  the  instrument  of  the 
reconciliation  offered  by  God.  In  entering  into  fellowship 
with  the  Son  by  faith  the  believers  become  themselves 
"children  of  God"  (Gal.  iii.  26),  *'and  if  children  then 
heirs,  joint-heirs  with  Christ."  United  with  him  in  the 
mystic  fellowship  of  his  death,  whereby  they  die  to  the 
flesh  and  sin,  they  inherit  with  him  the  blessedness  of 
the  kingdom  (Rom.  viii.  17). 

The  doctrine  of  Paul  cannot  be  understood  until  we 
have  fully  entered  into  his  conception  of  the  marvellous 
transformation  effected  in  the  life  of  the  believer  through 
his  fellowship  with  Christ  by  means  of  faith.  Marvellous 
it  must  first  of  all  be  regarded.  The  change  from  the 
state  of  subjection  to  the  law  and  from  the  dominion  of 
the  flesh  was  not  conceived  by  him  as  effected  through 
the  moral  influence  of  the  life  and  teaching  of  Christ, 
through  a  subjection  by  a  man's  own  effort  and  struggle 
of  the  impulses  of  the  flesh,  or  in  other  words  through 
such  a  process  of  growth  as  from   the  naturalistic  point 


V 


356  THE    TEACHER 

of  view  we  are  accustomed  to  see  in  the  attainment  of 
righteousness.  This  would  be  a  salvation  '*  by  works," 
which  Paul  repudiated  with  all  his  energy  as  an  im= 
possibility.  The  chasm  which  separated  the  man  ''  in  the 
flesh"  from  the  man  ''in  the  Spirit,"  the  man  under  the 
law  from  the  man  under  grace,  could  according  to  his 
thought  be  bridged  only  by  a  miracle.  Repentance  has 
no  prominent  place  in  his  scheme  of  salvation.  Instead 
of  a  "baptism  unto  repentance,"  he  emphasises  the  baptism 
into  the  death  of  Christ,  whereby  the  believer  comes  into 
the  mystic  fellowship  of  his  passion,  and  rises  '''to  newness 
of  life  "  in  the  fellowship  of  his  resurrection.  After  he 
had  given  the  death  blow  to  the  flesh  on  the  cross,  Christ 
in  rising  from  the  dead  entered  into  the  glorious  life  of  the 
Spirit  in  the  supersensible  world.  Of  this  life  those  par- 
take who  by  faith  come  into  fellowship  with  him.  In  the 
flesh  it  is  impossible  to  please  God.  But,  says  Paul  to 
the  Romans,  "ye  are  not  in  the  flesh,  but  in  the  Spirit,  if  so 
be  that  the  Spirit  of  God  dwell  in  you."  Already  in  this 
state  of  existence  the  Christian  is  living  that  wonderful 
life  which  belongs  to  "the  spiritually  minded" — a  life 
which  no  man  can  attain  of  himself,  though  he  seek  it 
with  repentance  and  tears,  but  which  is  the  "gift  of  God" 
to  those  who  have  faith.  Its  complete  consummation  is 
indeed  in  the  near  future,  when  Christ  shall  bring  it  in  full 
glory  in  the  kingdom,  but  even  now  "the  powers  of  the 
world  to  come"  work  in  the  believer.  The  writer  of 
Ephesians  expresses  the  Pauline  thought  quite  in  the  sense 
of  the  apostle  when  he  says  that  God,  "  when  we  were  dead 
in  sins,  hath  quickened  us  together  with  Christ  (by  grace 
ye  are  saved),  and  hath  raised  us  up  together,  and  made 
us  sit  together  [with  Christ]  in  the  heavenly  places" 
(Eph.  ii.  6). 

Thus  justification  is  an  act  of  God,  just  as  the  atone- 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  357 

ment  is  His  provision  and  is  offered  by  Him  for  men's 
acceptance.  The  subjective  factor,  the  act  of  faith,  is 
subordinate,  though  indispensable,  and  must  not  be  con- 
ceived as  the  effecting  of  an  achievement,  the  gaining  or 
attaining  of  righteousness.  One  can  hardly  say  that  Paul 
thought  of  faith  as  a  means  through  which  man  was  justi- 
fied, certainly  not  in  the  sense  that  it  was  the  cause  and 
justification  the  effect.  The  righteousness  in  question  is 
on  account  of  faith,  and  is  not  regarded  as  a  moral  condi- 
tion into  which  the  subject  has  brought  himself,  or  even 
as  one  that  has  been  bestowed  upon  him.  He  simply 
stands  in  a  new  relation  to  God,  a  relation  which  can  be 
accounted  for  by  no  natural  law  or  psychological  principle, 
but  one  that  is  dependent  upon  an  arbitrary  act  of  God. 
It  is  He  who  "justifies  the  ungodly,"  who  performs  this 
miracle  by  which  a  man  who  has  not  a  single  ''good 
work"  to  his  credit  is  declared  to  be  justified  or  to  be 
righteous  because  he  has  had  faith,  is  ''justified  by  faith 
without  the  deeds  of  the  law  "  (Rom.  iii.  28).  "  By  faith  " 
is  set  over  against  "by  works,"  but  is  not  to  be  inter- 
preted in  the  sense  of  a  growth  by  means  of  faith  into 
a  condition  of  righteousness,  for  no  actual  righteousness 
in  the  ethical  sense  is  assumed  in  the  case.  Faith  is 
"reckoned  as  righteousness,"  is  "imputed"  as  such  (Rom. 
iv.  9,  11).  The  disposition  which  faith  implies,  the  feeling 
of  trust  and  even  of  love,  gratitude,  and  submission  to 
God,  does  not  constitute  righteousness,  since  this  in  the 
Pauline  sense  is  acquittal  of  all  sin  before  the  divine  judg- 
ment. It  must  either  be  attained  by  keeping  the  law 
when  it  becomes  a  matter  of  "debt,"  or  it  must  be  ac- 
corded by  the  grace  of  God  "without  the  law,"  that  is, 
without  obedience  and  on  the  sole  condition  of  faith. 
Then  it  is  a  free  "gift,"  and  faith  is  reckoned  as  the 
equivalent  of  a  complete  observance  of  the  law. 


358  THE    TEACHER 

Good  works  are,  indeed,  supposed  to  follow,  when,  in 
fellowship  with  Christ  and  in  possession  of  the  Spirit,  the 
believer  lives  under  the  new  "law  of  the  Spirit  of  life"; 
but  they  are  not  the  condition  of  justification,  which  is 
accorded  because  of  faith,  or  rather  the  faith  itself  is 
accounted  as  righteousness  apart  from  works.  If  faith 
were  regarded  as  a  work  of  righteousness,  then  justifica- 
tion would  be  by  works  in  contradiction  with  the  funda- 
mental principle  of  the  apostle's  soteriology.  Moreover,  it 
will  not  do  to  say  that  the  apostle  regarded  justification  as 
granted  on  condition  of  faith  in  view  of  a  righteousness 
which  faith  may  be  assumed  to  initiate,  and  which  in  the 
future  will  develop  into  a  perfect  obedience  ;  for  in  that 
case  men  would  be  justified  because  of  an  ideal  or  possible 
fulfilment  of  the  law  and  not  because  of  an  actual  one 
—  a  doctrine  of  which  there  is  no  hint  in  Paul's  writings. 
The  faith  which  is  accounted  as  righteousness  is  regarded 
as  equivalent  to  a  complete  fulfilment  of  the  law,  that  is, 
it  puts  the  subject  in  the  same  relation  before  God  as  is 
that  of  the  man  who,  being  under  the  law,  is  not  under  its 
"  curse  "  because  he  has  "  continued  in  all  things  which 
are  written  in  the  book  of  the  law  to  do  them  "(Gal.  iii.  lo). 

The  attempt  to  find  an  ethical  basis  for  Paul's  doctrine 
of  justification  by  faith  can  hardly  be  regarded  as  success- 
ful. It  is,  indeed,  offensive  to  the  ethical  sense  that  a  man 
should  be  declared  righteous  who  has  attained  no  moral 
excellence.  Accordingly,  it  is  argued  that  by  reason  of 
the  fellowship  with  Christ  which  faith  effects  justification 
by  faith  has  a  real  ground,  and  the  subject  is  actually 
righteousness  before  he  is  declared  to  be  so.  But  the 
apostle  says  nothing  of  a  righteousness  which  is  attained 
by  means  of  faith,  when  he  treats  of  justification  by  faith. 
There  is,  indeed,  a  religious  experience  that  man  gains  him- 
self by  coming  into  fellowship  with  Christ  and  ideally  dying 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  359 

and  being  raised  with  him  in  baptism.  The  righteousness, 
however,  of  which  the  apostle  treats  in  his  teaching  of 
justification  is  not  gained,  but  is  bestowed  by  God.  He  is 
the  justifier  (Rom.  iii.  26,  iv.  5).  The  justification  is  His 
act  of  grace  pure  and  simple  on  the  ground  of  the  atone- 
ment made  by  Christ,  the  satisfaction  of  the  law,  the  con- 
demnation of  sin  in  the  flesh  on  the  cross.  This  "free 
gift,"  this  "gift  by  grace  "  (Rom.  v.  15-17)  consists  simply 
in  this,  that  the  man  who  has  actually  no  righteousness 
of  his  own  (righteousness  of  his  own  no  man  can  have 
according  to  Paul)  is  recognised  as  righteous  by  God. 
This  justification  is  God's  act,  just  as  the  atonement  was 
His,  was  conceived  and  carried  out  by  Him  without  man's 
participation.  Man's  relation  to  the  justification  which 
God  effects  is  purely  receptive.  He  has  only  to  accept 
the  proffered  grace  in  trust  and  confidence  in  the  promises 
of  God  or  by  faith  in  Him.  This  attitude  of  mind  will  be 
imputed  to  him  as  righteousness,  just  as  it  was  in  the  case 
of  Abraham,  for  "it  was  not  written  for  his  sake  alone  that 
it  was  imputed  to  him,  but  for  us  also,  to  whom  it  will  be 
imputed  if  we  believe  in  Him  who  raised  our  Lord  Jesus 
from  the  dead"  (Rom.  iv.  23,  24). 

In  2  Cor.  v.  21,  "that  we  might  be  made  the  righteous- 
ness of  God  in  him  [Christ],"  "in  him  "  does  not  relate  to 
the  fellowship  of  his  death,  the  mystic  union  with  him  of 
Rom.  vi.  3-8,  but  is  to  be  interpreted  in  the  sense  of  "in 
Christ  Jesus  "  in  Rom.  iii.  24,  that  is,  of  the  redemption 
that  is  in  him  who  "was  made  to  be  sin  for  us."  In  Phil, 
iii.  8,  9,  "  that  I  may  win  Christ  and  be  found  in  him,  not 
having  my  own  righteousness,"  the  latter  clause  is  not  con- 
nected with  the  former  in  the  sense  that  the  apostle's 
righteousness  results  from  being  found  (at  the  Parousia) 
in  Christ.  Rather  he  says  that  his  righteousness  is  that 
"  which  is  of  God  by  faith."    Then  he  goes  on  to  say,  "  that 


360  THE    TEACHER 

I  may  know  him  and  the  power  of  his  resurrection  and  the 
fellowship  of  his  sufferings,  being  made  conformable  to  his 
death,  if  by  any  means  I  might  attain  unto  the  resurrection 
of  the  dead,"  as  if  the  deeper  communion  with  Christ  and 
the  mystic  fellowship  were  conceived  as  a  progress  in 
Christian  experience  beyond  the  stage  of  justification  and 
as  necessary  to  the  attainment  of  the  resurrection  of  the 
dead.  In  Rom.  viii.  i  f.  and  2  Cor.  v.  17  the  apostle  is 
not  considering  justification  by  faith,  but  the  condition  of 
the  believer  in  the  fellowship  of  Christ  and  under  '*  the  law 
of  the  Spirit  of  life."  Justification  as  God's  act  is  nega- 
tively the  non-imputation  of  their  sins  to  men  (2  Cor. 
v.  19),  which  is  equivalent  to  forgiveness.  Satisfaction  for 
sin  having  been  rendered  on  the  cross,  forgiveness  is  not 
prominent  in  the  apostle's  thought.  In  fact  the  word  is 
not  employed  in  the  four  great  Epistles.  Sin  is  simply  not 
charged  against  the  man  who  accepts  and  appropriates  the 
atonement  in  faith  in  God's  promise.  He  then  stands  in 
an  entirely  new  relation  to  God,  is  free  from  the  condemna- 
tion of  the  law,  and  is  regarded  as  if  he  had  never  trans- 
gressed. He  has  received  the  reconciliation,  and  has 
** peace  with  God"  and  joy  in  Him  (Rom.  v.  i,  11),  and 
may  receive  the  Spirit  and  the  adoption  as  son. 

While,  however,  justification  is  not  accorded  on  the 
ground  of  attainment  in  the  moral-religious  life,  that  is,  on 
account  of  such  an  appropriation  of  the  spirit  and  life  of 
Christ  as  furnishes  an  ethical  basis  for  it,  it  is  not  to  be 
regarded  as  a  transaction  between  God  and  man  apart 
from  Christ.  The  subject  of  justification  is  on  the  contrary 
regarded  as  holding  a  relation  to  Christ  which  is  indis- 
pensable to  the  result.  In  the  first  place,  he  is  justified 
only  because  he  by  faith  comes  under  the  dispensation  of 
grace  which,  while  originating  with  God,  was  made  possible 
by  the  sacrifice  of  Christ.     He  is  liberated  from  the  law 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  36 1 

and  from  the  fruitless  attempt  to  attain  a  righteousness  of 
his  own  by  obedience  to  its  requirements,  and  this  deUver- 
ance  was  effected  for  him  through  Christ  who  on  the  cross 
became  "the  end  of  the  law  to  every  one  that  believeth." 
Accordingly,  the  apostle  reminds  the  Romans  that  they 
"are  become  dead  to  the  law  by  the  body  of  Christ." 
Through  the  death  of  Christ  the  obligation  to  the  law  was 
representatively  fulfilled  for  all  who  believe.  It  is  on  this 
ground,  that  is,  on  the  ground  of  the  relation  of  the 
believers  to  Christ  into  which  they  come  by  faith,  that 
justification  is  accorded.  While  as  the  representative 
head  of  the  human  race  he  died  for  all,  his  death  is  effec- 
tive for  justification  only  to  those  who  believe.  For  them 
"that  is  dead  wherein  they  were  held"  (Rom,  vii.  6),  and 
they  have  entered  into  a  new  relation  with  God  in  which 
righteousness  is  not  to  be  acquired,  but  is  "imputed,"  faith 
being  its  equivalent,  "The  law  hath  dominion  over  a  man 
as  long  as  he  liveth." 

The  behever  having  died  with  Christ  to  the  law  is  now 
free  from  it,  and  in  this  freedom  he  is  justified,  that  is, 
declared  to  be  righteous,  accounted  as  such,  because  he 
is  now  in  a  relation  to  God  in  which  righteousness  is  a 
matter  of  "grace"  and  not  of  "works."  Accordingly,  the 
apostle  declares  that  "through  the  law"  he  is  "dead  to 
the  law"  (Gal.  ii.  19),  that  through  the  requirement  of  the 
law  that  the  penalty  of  sin  is  death,  he,  having  died  ideally 
with  Christ,  is  dead  to  it.  Now  he  is  in  the  liberty  where- 
with Christ  has  made  him  free  (Gal.  v.  i),  having  been 
"bought  with  a  price"  (i  Cor.  vii.  23).  Along  with  this 
new  relation  there  go  certain  ethical  obligations,  and  a 
mode  of  life  is  required,  in  other  words,  "works"  are 
demanded,  and  the  believer  is  exhorted  to  "serve  in  new- 
ness of  the  spirit  and  not  in  the  oldness  of  the  latter,"  and 
to  "bring  forth  fruit  unto  God"  (Rom.  vii.  4,  6).     If  the 


362  THE    TEACHER 

believer  is  dead  to  the  law,  it  is  that  he  may  "live  unto 
God"  (Gal.  ii.  19).  He  is  required  not  to  "let  sin  reign  in 
his  mortal  body,  that  he  should  obey  it  in  the  lusts  thereof  " 
(Rom.  vii.  12).  But  this  ethical  life,  which  is  demanded 
as  alone  in"  conformity  with  the  new  relation  to  God,  should 
not  be  regarded  as  the  ground  of  justification.  Faith  alone 
was  its  ground,  and  it  was  "imputed  for  righteousness." 
As  believers  the  Christians  become  recipients  of  the  Spirit, 
and  enter  upon  a  life  in  which,  indeed,  the  supersensible 
agencies,  "the  powers  of  the  world  to  come,"  work  in 
them,  but  in  which  they  too  must  watch  and  work  under 
a  sense  of  the  highest  moral  obligation.  They  must 
"obey  from  the  heart  that  form  of  doctrine  which  was 
delivered  to  them  "  (Rom.  vi.  17).  They  may  be  "justified 
by  faith,"  and  the  "righteousness  of  the  law  is  thereby 
fulfilled  in  them,"  while  they  "walk  not  after  the  flesh, 
but  after  the  Spirit." 

In  accordance  with  the  fundamental  idea  of  the  doctrine 
of  justification,  that  the  righteousness  which  the  believer 
obtains  is  not  of  his  own  desert,  the  apostle  calls  it  "  the 
righteousness  of  God."  "The  gospel  of  Christ,"  he  says, 
"is  the  power  of  God  unto  salvation  to  every  one  that 
believeth,  ...  for  therein  is  revealed  the  righteousness  of 
God  from  faith  to  faith  "  (Rom.  i.  16,  17)  —  "from  faith" 
so  far  as  the  justification  proceeds  from  faith  (Gal.  ii.  16), 
and  "to  faith"  so  far  as  the  proclamation  of  the  gospel 
leads  to  faith.  This  righteousness  of  God  is  not  that 
which  avails  before  Him,  or  that  is  acceptable  to  Him,  or 
that  He  produces  with  their  cooperation  by  an  influence 
exerted  upon  men,  but  that  of  which  He  is  the  author, 
originator,  and  bestower,  and  of  which  they  are  the  recipi- 
ents on  condition  of  faith.  This  doctrine  is  clearly  ex- 
pressed in  the  declarations  that  God  "is  the  justifier  of 
him  who  believeth  in  Jesus,"  that  "to  him  that  worketh 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  363 

not  but  believeth  on  Him  who  justificth  the  ungodly,  his 
faith  is  counted  for  righteousness,"  and  that  "God 
imputeth  righteousness  without  works "  (Rom.  iii.  26, 
iv.  5,  6).  The  words  :  "The  righteousness  of  God  which 
is  by  faith  in  Jesus  Christ  unto  all  (et?  Traz^ra?)  them 
that  believe"  (Rom.  iii.  22),  denote  that  the  source  of  the 
righteousness  is  in  God,  from  whom  it  proceeds  to  the 
believer  by  the  divine  decree  or  by  imputation.  In  Rom. 
X.  3  this  righteousness  is  contrasted  with  that  which  men 
seek  to  acquire  and  possess  as  "  their  own,"  and  in  Phil, 
iii.  9  it  is  more  precisely  designated  as  "  the  righteousness 
which  is  of  God  by  faith."  The  meaning  is  not,  however, 
that  God  communicates  to  man  the  quality  of  His  own 
being  known  as  righteousness,  nor  that  He  produces  an 
activity  in  him  which  leads  to  his  attainment  of  a  right- 
eousness, which  would  then  be  to  a  degree  "his  own"  in 
opposition  to  the  ground-principle  of  the  Pauline  doctrine 
of  justification.  When  the  apostle  says  that  on  account  of 
Christ's  having^  been  made  to  be  sin  for  men  they  "are 
made  the  righteousness  of  God  in  him"  (2  Cor.  v.  21),  he 
means  that  by  reason  of  the  atonement  God  attributes 
righteousness  to  men  —  a  righteousness  which  is  His  or  of 
Him  in  the  sense  that  He  declares  it  of  the  man  who  has 
faith,  and  regards  him  as  standing  in  a  relation  to  Him  in 
which  his  trespasses  are  not  "imputed"  to  him.  The  act 
of  justification  is  not  the  creation  of  a  condition,  but  the 
declaration  and  recognition  of  a  relation.  This  relation 
has  been  made  possible  through  the  atonement  of  Christ, 
and  is  one  of  reconciliation,  so  far  as  the  believer  has 
accepted  the  proffered  grace.  On  God's  part  he  is  recog- 
nised as  through  Christ  released  from  the  law  and  from 
penalty.  On  the  believer's  part  he  has  "  peace  with  God," 
and  regards  himself  as  "saved  from  the  wrath  through 
him"  by  whose  "blood"  he  has  been  "justified"  (Rom. 


364  THE    TEACHER 

V.  I,  9).  In  this  new  relation  the  Christian  Hfe  is  sup- 
posed to  take  its  course  under  the  guidance  and  inspiration 
of  the  Spirit  during  the  brief  time  which  will  elapse  before 
Christ  comes  to  establish  his  kingdom  and  claim  his  own. 

But  to  the  question  whether  he  who  has  been  justified 
by  faith  and  has  received  the  adoption  as  a  son  of  God  is 
certainly  saved,  that  is,  safe  against  the  approaching  "  day 
of  the  Lord"  and  sure  of  the  "inheritance"  in  the  king- 
dom, there  appear  to  be  conflicting  answers.  On  the  one 
hand,  the  believers  have  the  witness  of  the  Spirit  that  they 
are  adopted  as  sons  of  God,  and  as  sons  they  are  declared 
to  be  ''heirs  of  God  "  and  ''joint-heirs  with  Christ "  (Rom. 
viii.  16,  17).  In  other  words,  having  the  "earnest  of  the 
Spirit,"  they  are  certain  of  a  participation  in  the  coming 
"glory"  of  the  kingdom  or  of  "salvation."  Moreover,  the 
believers  are  elected  of  God,  "  God's  elect,"  and  as  such 
are  assured  of  being  "  Christ's  at  his  coming."  For 
"  whom  He  did  predestinate  them  He  also  called,  and  whom 
He  called  them  He  also  justified,  and  whom  He  justified 
them  He  also  glorified  "  (Rom.  viii.  30).  To  be  "glorified" 
is  to  share  in  the  "glory"  {Zo^a)  of  the  coming  kingdom,  or 
to  be  "saved  from  the  wrath,"  and  so  certain  is  it  that  the 
believers  will  have  this  great  fortune  that  the  apostle 
speaks  of  it  as  an  accomplished  fact,  since  in  the  purpose 
of  God  it  is  already  effected.  The  divine  love  which 
"foreknew"  and  "predestinated"  the  Christians  will 
surely  gather  them  to  the  glorious  inheritance  prepared 
for  them  from  the  foundation  of  the  world  ;  and  from  this 
love  both  of  Christ  who  died  for  them  and  of  God  who 
established  the  great  atonement  nothing  can  separate 
them,  not  tribulation  or  persecution  or  famine  or  sword, 
not  death  or  life  or  the  demonic  "  principalities  and 
powers "  or  things  present  or  things  to  come  (Rom. 
viii.  35,  38,  39). 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  365 

On  the  other  hand,  nothing  can  be  more  evident  than 
that  the  apostle  in  other  passages  employs  expressions 
which  denote  anything  but  a  certainty  that  those  who  have 
been  "justified"  will  surely  be  saved.  The  Christian  life 
is  depicted  as  a  course  to  be  run,  a  conflict  with  opposing 
powers,  a  struggle  against  the  flesh,  a  warfare  in  which  the 
issue  is  doubtful,  since  the  efforts  required  depend  upon 
the  disposition  and  choice  of  the  believers  themselves. 
The  *Mife"  of  the  believers,  their  moral-religious  life  in 
the  present  age  as  well  as  their  eschatological  life,  that  of 
the  kingdom,  or  their  salvation,  is  represented  as  de- 
pendent on  their  mortifying,  that  is,  destroying,  the  '*  deeds 
of  the  body."  If  they  live  after  the  flesh  they  will 
"die."  In  this  struggle  against  the  flesh  they  have, 
indeed,  the  aid  of  the  Spirit,  but  "  through  the  Spirit  "  they 
must  themselves  slay  the  flesh  (Rom.  viii.  13).  Accord- 
ingly, they  are  exhorted  to  present  their  "  bodies  a  living 
sacrifice,  holy,  acceptable  unto  God,"  and  following  this 
exhortation  is  a  long  series  of  injunctions  requiring  a  great 
variety  of  "  works,"  the  crowning  one  of  which  is  love, 
which  "is  the  fulfilling  of  the  law  "  (Rom.  xii.  xiii.).  Even 
believers,  who  in  the  early  portion  of  the  Epistle  are  rep- 
resented as  "  elected  "  to  salvation,  as  sons  and  heirs  of 
God,  are  here  exhorted  to  "cast  off  the  works  of  darkness 
and  put  on  the  armour  of  light,"  as  if  their  spiritual  fortune 
depended  on  their  personal  achievement.  The  conditions 
in  the  Corinthian  church  which  the  first  Epistle  indicates 
show  that  believers,  the  elect  of  God,  are  not  so  secure  in 
their  position  as  not  to  fall  away  and  require  apostolic 
admonition  and  discipline.  Their  "contentions"  denote 
anything  but  the  prevalence  of  "brotherly  love,"  and  there 
was  one  case  at  least  of  a  sexual  relation  which  the  apos- 
tle felt  called  upon  to  condemn  without  qualification  (i  Cor. 
i.  1 1,  V.  I  f.).     Exhortations  to  the  Thessalonians  regarding 


366  THE    TEACHER 

the  same  matters  show  that  the  beUevers  who  had  been 
theoretically  justified  "without  works"  must  carry  on  the 
old,  endless  conflict  with  the  flesh,  and  be  watchful  as  to 
how  they  "ought  to  walk  and  to  please  God"  (i  Thess.  iv. 
1-5).  Even  the  apostle  himself  acknowledges  that  he  has 
to  "fight,"  and  "keep  under  his  body,"  and  "bring  it  into 
subjection."  The  "incorruptible  crown"  must  be  "ob- 
tained," and  only  he  "that  striveth  "  will  gain  it  (i  Cor. 
ix.  24-27).* 

*  An  interesting  aspect  of  the  apostle's  doctrine  of  sin  is  presented  in  his 
teaching  regarding  the  relation  to  it  in  which  he  theoretically  regarded  the 
believers  as  standing.  For  his  own  part,  he  expresses  no  consciousness  of  sin 
from  the  time  of  his  conversion,  and  no  sense  of  the  daily  need  of  a  petition 
for  the  divine  forgiveness  implied  in  the  Lord's  prayer.  With  the  "old 
things  "  that  are  passed,  the  old  sinful  life,  he  has  broken  forever,  and  leaves 
them  behind  (2  Cor.  v.  17;  Phil.  iii.  12).  He  is  a  "new  creation,"  and  being 
"  in  Christ,"  he  knows  no  longer  anything  of  the  burden  of  "  condemnation  " 
(Rom.  viii.  i).  He  regarded  his  fellow-believers  from  the  point  of  view  of  his 
own  consciousness  of  "life  "  in  the  Spirit,  so  far  at  least  as  his  theory  of  their 
religious  state  was  concerned.  They  were  "  dead  to  sin,"  and  having  been 
"made  free"  from  it,  they  "became  servants  of  righteousness"  (Rom,  vi.  2, 
18).  In  ideally  dying  with  Christ  (Rom.  vi.  3,  8,  10)  they  "crucified  the 
flesh  with  its  affections  and  lusts"  (Gal.  v.  24).  They  are  not  "in  the  flesh, 
but  in  the  Spirit,"  are  "  led  "  by  it,  while  it  bears  witness  to  them  that  they  are 
"the  children  of  God"  (Rom.  vii.  5,  viii.  9,  14,  16).  Such  expressions  lend 
support  to  the  supposition  that  Paul's  missionary  preaching  was  religious  rather 
than  ethical,  that  its  emphasis  was  placed  on  the  mystic  effects  of  baptism,  on 
" sanctification,"  and  on  "justification"  (i  Cor.  vi.  ii).  His  expectation  of 
the  immediate  coming  of  Christ  to  receive  the  "justified"  believers  into  the 
kingdom  may  have  disturbed  his  perspective  of  the  course  of  moral  struggle 
which  actually  lay  before  his  churches.  Hence  the  ethical-religious  paradoxes. 
The  Corinthians,  whom  he  rebukes  for  their  moral  delinquencies,  are  declared 
to  be  "  enriched  in  all  utterance  and  all  knowledge,"  and  to  "  come  behind  in 
no  gift."  God  will  "  confirm  them  blameless  in  the  day  of  Christ "  (the 
Parousia).  They  are  "the  temple  of  God  "  (i  Cor.  i.  4-8,  iii.  16,  17).  These 
morally  very  censurable  men  are  religiously  "  sanctified  in  Christ  Jesus,  called 
to  be  saints"  (i  Cor.  i.  2).  The  "forensic"  character  of  their  justification  is 
thus  apparent.  That  they  were  "  puffed  up "  in  their  sense  of  religious 
security  is  not  surprising  (i  Cor.  v.  2).  The  fact  that  doctrinally  Paul  made  no 
provision  for  the  sins  of  believers  shows  that  he  took  little  account  of  sin  as  a 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  367 

Notwithstanding,  moreover,  that  the  possession  of  the 
Spirit  is  an  assurance  of  the  resurrection  (Rom.  viii.  11), 
the  apostle  declares  to  the  Philippians  that  the  resurrec- 
tion is  an  attainment  which  yet  lies  before  him,  and  ex- 
horts them  to  work  out  their  own  salvation  (Phil.  iii.  12,  ii. 
12).  Thus  in  practice  ''works"  come  to  their  rights  at 
last  in  a  doctrine  which  theoretically  maintained  justifica- 
tion by  faith  without  them.  The  validity  of  works  in  the 
judgment  is  as  much  a  fundamental  teaching  of  the  apos- 
tle as  is  justification  without  them.  God,  "  the  justifier  of 
the  ungodly "  through  faith,  "  will  render  to  every  man 
according  to  his  deeds  "  (Rom.  ii.  6).  Although  merit  is 
vigorously  repudiated,  it  is  also  acknowledged  (i  Cor.  ix. 
17).  Before  the  judgment-seat  of  Christ  "every  one  will 
receive  the  things  done  in  his  body,  according  to  that  he 
hath  done,  whether  it  be  good  or  bad"  (2  Cor.  v.  to). 
There  is  peril  lest  the  Christian  who  has  come  into  the 
liberty  of  Christ  lapse  into  the  old  bondage,  and  he  must 
watch  and  struggle  in  order  that  he  may  "stand  fast" 
(Gal.  V.  i).  To  the  Philippians  the  apostle  says:  "Those 
things  which  ye  have  both  learned  and  received  and  heard 
and  seen  in  me,  do"  (Phil.  iv.  9).  If  "the  righteousness 
that  is  by  faith  "  is  without  an  ethical  basis,  this  is  abun- 
dantly  supplied    for   that    course  of   religious   experience 

condition  from  which  those  could  need  to  be  dehvered  who  had  once  been 
"  justified."  The  atonement  is  not  applied  to  them.  Faith  saves  once  only, 
and  he  who  through  it  has  become  a  "  new  creation  "  is  not  conceived  as 
again  needing  this  salvation.  Paul  can  hardly  have  thought  that  any  one  of 
his  believers  would  be  finally  rejected  when  Christ  should  come.  The  spirit 
of  even  the  incestuous  man  was  to  be  "  saved  in  the  day  of  the  Lord."  God 
would  not  suffer  the  Christians  to  be  "  tempted  above  that  which  they  were 
able"  (i  Cor.  x.  13).  The  appearance  of  all  believers  "before  the  judgment- 
seat  of  Christ"  (i  Cor.  iv.  5;  2  Cor.  v.  10)  does  not  imply  that  the  condemna- 
tion to  "  perishing  "  would  fall  upon  any  one  of  them.  This  "  heaven-storming 
idealism  "  was  not  shaken  by  the  apostle's  experience  of  the  moral  delinquencies 
of  his  converts,  which  he  did  not  fail  to  reprove  with  due  energy. 


368  THE    TEACHER 

which  the  apostle  conceived  as  lying  between  the  theo- 
retical imputation  of  righteousness  and  the  judgment  of 
the  Parousia.  The  relation  to  God  implied  in  ''justifica- 
tion by  faith"  — and  it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  there 
is  only  a  relation  in  the  case  —  places  the  subject  in  a 
situation  of  freedom  from  the  law  and  its  penalty,  of 
arbitrary  separation  from  his  past  life,  in  which  he  may, 
as  a  child  of  God  and  a  possessor  of  the  divine  Spirit,  pur- 
sue a  course  of  development  subject  to  all  the  ethical 
principles  and  requirements. 

The  dependence  of  the  entire  theory  of  justification  by 
faith  upon  the  apostle's  doctrine  of  the  atonement  is  mani- 
fest. Without  the  theoretical  satisfaction  of  the  law,  the 
payment  of  the  penalty  of  sin,  the  buying  off  of  the  sin- 
ner from  "  the  curse  of  the  law,"  there  would  be  no  basis 
for  a  justification  by  faith,  the  non-imputation  of  tres- 
passes, the  declaring  of  a  man  to  be  righteous  without 
works,  or  his  establishment  in  the  same  relation  to  the 
law  in  which  he  would  have  been  if  he  had  actually  ful- 
filled its  requirements.  Accordingly,  the  validity  and  per- 
manent value  of  the  doctrine  must  be  questioned  by  any 
one  who  is  not  convinced  that  the  Pauline  representative 
atonement  accords  with  the  facts  of  human  nature  and  ex- 
perience. To  one  who  believes  in  the  continuity  of  char- 
acter, and  who  cannot  accept  the  teaching  that,  on  condition 
of  faith  in  the  doctrine  that  another  has  suffered  for  his 
sins  and  given  his  soul  for  him,  his  life  can  be  arbitrarily 
severed  at  the  point  where  that  faith  emerges,  and  the 
consequences  of  his  past  acts  annulled,  the  theory  of  justi- 
fication by  faith  must  appear  as  a  speculation  which  is  not 
to  be  taken  seriously.  To  the  apostle,  however,  it  was  not 
an  empty  form,  because  he  took  the  doctrine  of  the  atone- 
ment very  seriously,  and  for  him  it  was  a  fundamental 
proposition  that  if  righteousness  were  attainable  by  works, 


FAITH  AND  JUSTIFICATION  369 

"Christ  is  dead  in  vain"  (Gal.  ii.  21).  Yet,  as  we  have 
seen,  he  could  not  in  practice  dispense  with  works,  and 
could  construe  the  judgment  upon  no  other  basis.  Every 
reader  of  his  Epistles  knows  with  what  intense  solicitude 
he  watched  over  his  converts  to  see  that  they  did  not  come 
short  of  a  righteousness  by  works.  How  he  reconciled  the 
contradictory  propositions,  if  he  attempted  their  reconcilia- 
tion at  all,  we  do  not  know.  To  us  they  constitute  one  of 
the  antinomies  of  his  thought.  Their  reconciliation  is, 
however,  of  slight  importance  to  those  who  construct  their 
ethics  upon  the  recognised  principle  of  the  continuity  of 
character  and  upon  the  facts  of  human  experience,  and  who 
accept  as  the  basis  of  their  moral  philosophy  the  good 
Pauline  doctrine  that  judgment  will  be  rendered  "to  every 
man  according  to  his  works." 


CHAPTER    XV 

ETHICS 

THAT  Saul  of  Tarsus,  born  of  Jewish  parentage  and 
educated  in  the  Jewish  traditions  and  Scriptures, 
should,  as  the  Christian  Paul,  be  a  man  of  profound  ethi- 
cal convictions  and  earnest  ethical  purpose,  is  in  the  nature 
of  the  case  to  be  expected.  It  is  not,  however,  to  be  looked 
for  that  a  man  of  his  occupations,  a  missionary,  preacher, 
bishop  of  souls,  engaged  in  a  contest  with  Jewish  Chris- 
tianity, persecuted  and  imprisoned,  should,  in  the  letters 
written  to  the  churches  to  meet  special  exigencies,  formu- 
late an  ethical  system.  When  we  consider,  moreover, 
that  his  predominant  interest  was  religious,  and  that,  in 
view  of  his  expectation  of  the  early  termination  of  the 
course  of  "  the  present  age  "  by  the  coming  of  Christ  to 
judgment,  the  salvation  of  men,  or  their  preparation  for 
entrance  into  the  kingdom  whose  establishment  would 
introduce  the  eagerly  expected  "age  to  come,"  was  the  one 
matter  of  most  urgent  moment,  we  shall  not  be  surprised 
to  find  his  ethics  subordinated  to  his  soteriology.  The  so- 
teriological  interest  culminates  in  the  doctrine  of  the  Spirit, 
which  must  be  taken  into  account  in  the  discussion  of  the 
apostle's  ethics.  The  Spirit  is  a  supernatural  power,  which 
he  believed  to  come  to  the  aid  of  the  natural  faculties  of 
men  and  to  enable  them  to  compass  a  moral-religious  life 
otherwise  unattainable.  This  teaching  is  founded  upon 
his  doctrine  of  Christ,  in  whose  death  he  saw  the  end  of  the 
law,  the  destruction  of  the  flesh,  the  overthrow  of  the  power 

370 


ETHICS  371 

of  sin,  an  opportunity  for  all  who  would  accept  the  atone- 
ment by  faith  to  sever  themselves  from  their  former  life 
and  all  its  consequences  of  penalty  and  shame,  to  be  de- 
clared righteous  or  justified  by  faith,  and  to  begin  a  new 
spiritual  existence  under  "the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life." 
The  righteousness  which  they  could  not  attain  of  them- 
selves by  "works"  would  thus  be  "imputed"  to  them  on 
account  of  their  faith,  and  coming  into  mystical  fellowship 
with  Christ  in  baptism  they  would,  in  his  indwelling  pres- 
ence, possess  the  Spirit,  the  "pledge"  of  all  that  the  love 
of  God  could  bestow. 

The  Spirit  bestows  "gifts."  "To  one  is  given  by  the 
Spirit  the  word  of  wisdom,  to  another  the  word  of  know- 
ledge, ...  to  another  faith,  ...  to  another  gifts  of  heal- 
ing, .  .  .  prophecy,  divers  kinds  of  tongues"  (i  Cor.  xii. 
6-1 1).  It  "  sheds  abroad  the  love  of  God  "  in  the  heart  of 
the  believer.  It  is  the  Spirit  of  adoption  as  a  son,  and 
bears  witness  with  the  spirit  of  the  Christian  that  he  is 
the  son  of  God,  who  walks  in  the  Spirit,  is  impelled  by  the 
Spirit,  serves  God  in  the  Spirit,  and  is  the  temple  of  the 
Holy  Ghost  (Rom.  v.  5,  vii.  6,  viii.  14-16;  i  Cor.  vi.  19; 
Gal.  V.  25).  The  subjection  of  the  entire  life  of  the  be- 
liever to  the  influence  of  the  Spirit  —  a  teaching  original 
with  Paul  and  distinguishing  his  pneumatology  from  that 
of  the  Jews  and  the  primitive  Christians  generally  —  results 
in  attributing  to  the  Spirit  certain  ethical  qualities  and 
achievements  in  the  believers  which  were  not  by  his  con- 
temporaries regarded  as  of  supernatural  origin. 

This  ethical  point  of  view  is  not  free  from  difficulties 
and  from  inconsistencies  which  are  not  easily  reconciled. 
The  apostle's  recognition  of  a  moral  ability  in  the  natural 
man  denotes  the  acceptance  of  a  principle  fundamental  in 
any  ethical  view  of  human  life.  Men  possess  by  nature 
an  insight  into  "that   which   may  be   known  of  God,"   it 


3/2  THE    TEACHER 

being  "shown  unto  them"  in  "the  things  that  are 
made,"  so  that  "  the  wrath  of  God  is  revealed  against  all 
ungodliness  and  unrighteousness  of  men."  "The  gen- 
tiles, who  have  not  the  law,"  "show  the  work  of  the  law 
written  in  their  hearts,  their  conscience  also  bearing  wit- 
ness and  their  thoughts  accusing  or  else  excusing  one 
another."  Though  they  go  far  astray,  yet  they  know 
"that  they  who  commit  such  things  are  worthy  of  death  " 
(Rom.  i.  18-20,  32,  ii.  14).  The  "conscience"  of  the 
natural  man  and  his  knowledge  of  God  through  "the 
things  that  are  made"  render  him  "without  excuse"  for 
his  moral  delinquencies  (Rom.  i.  20,  ii.  i).  How  much 
more  the  Jew,  who  has  the  great  "advantage"  that  to  him 
"were  committed  the  oracles  of  God."  Yet  of  both  Paul 
declares  that  it  is  impossible  that  they  should  be  accepta- 
ble to  God  with  their  utmost  ethical  striving.  Righteous- 
ness by  "  works  "  is  unattainable.  There  is  no  recognition 
of  such  a  righteousness  in  the  theoretical  ethics  of  the 
apostle.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  emphatically  and  re- 
peatedly repudiated  (Rom.  iii.  20;  Gal.  iii.  11).  The  two 
propositions,  that  man  possesses  an  ethical  capacity  which 
renders  him  "  without  excuse  "  for  not  attaining  righteous- 
ness, and  that  with  the  most  conscientious  employment  of 
it  he  cannot  compass  such  an  attainment,  are  not  easily 
reconciled.  Equally  confusing  to  the  ethical  judgment  are 
the  two  propositions  that  "  as  many  as  sin  without  law 
{i.e.  without  the  explicit  Mosaic  code)  shall  also  perish 
without  law,"  and  that  where  this  law,  which  "worketh 
wrath,"  is  not,  "there  is  no  transgression,"  and  "sin  is 
not  imputed"  (Rom.  ii.  12,  iv.  15,  v.  13).  Before  the  law 
was  given,  "sin  was  in  the  world,"  and  men  "without  the 
law"  had  the  accusing  conscience,  yet  sin  was  not  "im- 
puted." Sin  exists,  and  calls  down  the  divine  "indigna- 
tion and  wrath,"  and  yet  it  is  not  reckoned  as  sin.     An 


ETHICS  373 

express  recognition  and  imputation  of  it,  however,  appear 
to  be  declared  in  the  teaching  that  its  penalty,  death, 
''reigned,"  and  wrought  its  frightful  ravages  from  Adam 
to  Moses  "even  on  those  who  had  not  sinned  after  the 
similitude  of  Adam's  trangression  "  (Rom.  v.  14). 

The  radical  departure  from  the  Old  Testament  ethical 
point  of  view  denoted  by  the  teaching  that  man  cannot 
attain  a  righteousness  of  his  own,  must  be  regarded  as  a 
defect  in  the  ethics  of  the  apostle.  Its  result  in  those  who 
receive  it  can  be  nothing  else  than  a  moral  discouragement 
and  a  paralysis  of  the  moral  powers.  One  cannot  without 
mockery  exhort  men  to  strive  for  the  unattainable.  *  The 
direct  relation  of  the  moral  agent  to  God,  which  is  such  a 
hopeful  feature  of  the  Old  Testament  ethics,  is  obscured 
in  the  ethics  of  Paul,  in  which  the  law  stands  like  an  inex- 
orable fate  between  God  and  man,  demands  the  avenging 
divine  wrath  against  the  sinner  in  satisfaction  of  its  claims, 
and  forbids  the  extending  of  the  hand  of  mercy,  until 
through  an  acceptance  of  the  sacrifice  of  Christ  a  way  is 
opened  for  the  granting  of  pardon.  The  Old  Testament 
ethics  had  a  great  advantage  in  the  fundamental  presuppo- 
sitions, that  the  law,  instead  of  being  ''given  that  sin 
might  abound,"  was  given  that  it  might  be  obeyed,  and 
that  obedience  was  within  the  ability  of  the  subject.  We 
cannot  too  highly  estimate  the  vast  ethical  encouragement 
and  inspiration  which  belong  to  such  a  conception  of 
man's  moral  relation  to  God  as  is  expressed  in  the  follow- 
ing:  "For  the  Lord  will  again  rejoice  over  thee  for  good 
as  He  rejoiced  over  thy  fathers,  if  thou  shalt  hearken  unto 
the  voice  of  the  Lord  to  keep  His  commandments,  .  .  .  and 
if  thou  turn  unto  the  Lord  with  all  thy  heart  and  with  all 
thy  soul."  The  commandment  is  not  so  high  that  it  can- 
not be  obeyed,  or  so  far  off  that  it  cannot  be  apprehended. 
"  It  is  not  in  heaven  that  thou  shouldst  say,  who  shall  go 


374  THE    TEACHER 

up  for  US  to  heaven,  and  bring  it  unto  us,  .  .  .  neither  is 
it  beyond  the  sea,  .  .  .  but  the  word  is  very  nigh  unto 
thee,  in  thy  mouth  and  in  thy  heart,  tJiat  thoit  inayest  do  it'' 
(Deut.  XXX.  I,  2,  10-15).  One  cannot  read  far  in  the  Old 
Testament  without  meeting  with  expressions  of  ethical 
courage  and  strains  of  hope  and  of  joy  in  moral  victory. 
The  moral  achievement  is  assumed  as  a  matter  of  course, 
and  is  attended  by  the  blessedness  of  dwelling  in  the  di- 
vine presence.  ''Who  shall  abide  in  Thy  tabernacle  ? " 
asks  a  psalmist ;  and  the  confident  answer  is,  "  He  that 
walketh  uprightly,  and  worketh  righteousness "  (Ps.  xv. 
I,  2).  It  is  assumed  that  he  who  knows  ''the  path  of 
life  "  is  able  to  walk  in  it  ;  and  if  he  grope  and  stumble, 
God  will  show  him  the  path,  and  "  in  His  presence  is  ful- 
ness of  joy"  (Ps.  xvi.  11).  The  rewards  of  the  Lord  are 
according  to  one's  own  righteousness  and  "  the  cleanness 
of  one's  hands  "  (Ps.  xviii.  20)  —  a  most  salutary  ethical 
point  of  view  if  the  ethics  of  reward  is  to  be  at  all  rec- 
ommended, but  one  which  Paul  could  not  approve,  who 
censures  the  Jews  for  "going  about  to  establish  their  own 
righteousness"  with  *'a  zeal  of  God,  but  not  according  to 
knowledge "  (Rom.  x.  2,  3).  In  the  Hebrew  morals  the 
moral  agent  finds  encouragement  in  the  divine  forgiveness, 
when  he  is  despondent  in  view  of  his  imperfect  achieve- 
ment. "  I  said,  I  will  confess  my  transgressions  unto  the 
Lord,  and  Thou  forgavest  the  iniquity  of  my  sins"  (Ps. 
xxxii.  5).  This  relation  of  man  to  God  could  hardly  be 
acknowledged  in  the  Pauline  scheme,  for  there  the  non- 
imputation  of  sin  was  due  to  the  fact  that  sin  had  been 
atoned  for  by  the  sacrifice  of  Christ,  and  its  penalty  thus 
paid.  Whoever  had  faith  was  acknowledged  on  account 
of  this  as  righteous,  and  his  past  sins  were  not  "imputed." 
The  love  of  God  indeed  was  behind  the  scheme  of  atone- 
ment, but  it  is  manifest  that  the  relation  of  man  to  a  God 


ETHICS  375 

who  forgives  is  radically  different  from  that  to  a  God  who 
accepts  one  as  righteous  ''without  works,"  because  one  has 
faith  in  an  atonement  which  has  satisfied  the  law. 

Against  the  Pauline  doctrine  of  a  supernatural  righteous- 
ness for  which  faith  is  "  imputed,"  and  which  is  expressly 
declared  not  to  be  attained  by  works  and  not  to  be  of 
"merit,"  must  be  urged  the  objection  on  moral  grounds 
that  it  presupposes  a  breaking  of  the  ethical  continuity  of 
life.  If  in  the  course  of  human  experience  such  a  right- 
eousness were  at  all  possible,  its  possessor  would  have 
been  violently  transferred  from  the  natural  condition  of 
moral  struggle  and  endeavour,  in  which  he  was  neither 
wholly  good  nor  altogether  bad,  into  a  supernatural  state 
of  complete  righteousness,  which  he  had  done  nothing  to 
acquire  except  to  perform  an  act  of  faith. 

The  genesis  of  this  ethical  teaching  must  be  sought  in 
related  doctrines  of  the  apostle.  One  of  its  roots  undoubt- 
edly strikes  into  his  doctrine  of  the  Flesh  —  the  ethical 
dualism  of  flesh  and  Spirit,  which  is  certainly  of  Hellenistic 
origin.  According  to  this  teaching,  man  could  not  attain 
righteousness  by  reason  of  the  strength  of  the  evil  impulses 
of  the  flesh.  The  sin  that  dwells  in  him  impels  him  to  do 
what  he  hates.  Despite  his  delight  in  the  law  of  God 
after  the  inward  man,  the  law  in  his  members  brings 
him  "into  captivity  to  the  law  of  sin  and  death"  (Rom. 
vii.  14-25).  "The  mind  of  the  flesh  is  enmity  against 
God,"  is  not  subject  to  His  law,  "and  cannot  be."  The 
natural  man  is  "in  the  flesh,"  and  "the  motions  of  sin 
which  are  by  the  law  work  in  his  members  to  bring  forth 
fruit  unto  death  "  (Rom.  vii.  5,  viii.  7).  To  the  apostle  there 
was  no  natural  way  of  deliverance  from  this  condition. 
By  the  law  came  the  knowledge  of  sin.  It  was  given  that 
sin  might  abound,  and  was  a  provocation  to  transgression 
(Rom.   vii.   7-12).     It    could    not    effect    man's    salvation. 


376  THE    TEACHER 

because  it  was  ''weak  through  the  flesh"  (Rom.  viii.  3). 
Speaking  of  himself  for  the  natural  man,  Paul  says  :  "  Sin 
taking  occasion  by  the  commandment  wrought  in  me  all 
manner  of  concupiscence.  For  without  the  law  sin  was 
dead.  For  I  was  alive  without  the  law  once ;  but  when 
the  commandment  came,  sin  revived,  and  I  died  "  (Rom. 
vii.  8,  9).  Since,  then,  man  could  not  save  himself  by  his 
own  ethical  striving  on  account  of  the  flesh,  and  since  the 
law  was  ineffective  for  the  same  reason,  there  remained 
only  a  resort  to  a  supernatural  righteousness,  and  the 
apostle's  resort  to  this  must  be  regarded  as  a  logical  step 
from  his  premises.  When  all  other  means  fail,  the  divine 
powers  must  be  invoked. 

Another  root  of  the  ethical  principle  in  question  lies  in 
the  apostle's  Christology.  He  could  never  have  become  a 
Christian  had  he  seen  in  Christ  nothing  more  than  an 
ethical  and  religious  teacher  who  had  died  as  a  martyr  to 
his  convictions.  It  was  the  followers  of  a  Christ  "  according 
to  the  flesh  "  whom  he  persecuted.  The  Christ  "  according 
to  the  Spirit,"  whom  he  knew  in  and  after  his  conversion, 
was  a  supernatural  being,  who  in  his  death  and  resurrection 
became  the  author  of  a  supernatural  salvation  by  putting 
an  end  to  the  old  order  of  sin,  the  law,  and  death  and 
introducing  the  divine  order  of  ''the  Spirit  of  life."  A 
Christ  who  did  not  effect  a  supernatural  atonement,  and 
become  the  author  of  a  supernatural  righteousness,  could 
not  have  won  his  devotion  and  service.  To  him  Christ 
was  the  divinely  appointed  agent  for  the  accomplishment 
of  a  salvation  which  all  other  agencies,  man's  own  "  mind," 
which  "serves  the  law  of  God,"  the  law,  and  the  prophets, 
could  not  effect.  "What  the  law  could  not  do  in  that  it 
was  weak  through  the  flesh,  God,  sending  His  own  Son  in 
the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh,  condemned  sin  in  the  flesh,  that 
the  righteousness  of  the  law  might  be  fulfilled  in  us,  who 


ETHICS  377 

walk  not  after  the  flesh,  but  after  the  Spirit "  (Rom. 
vii.  3,  4).  In  order  to  effect  man's  deliverance  from  the 
law^  the  righteousness  of  which  was  unattainable  by  his 
utmost  ethical  endeavour,  its  claims  must  be  satisfied  by  the 
payment  of  a  ransom.  Accordingly,  to  the  apostle,  Christ 
was  in  his  death  a  ''propitiation  through  faith  in  his 
blood  "(Rom.  iii.  25),  and  on  the  cross  he  redeemed  men 
(i^rjyopaaep,  bought  them  off)  from  the  curse  of  the  law 
(Gal.  iii.  13).  The  old  dispensation  with  all  its  great  moral 
precepts  and  its  splendid  examples  of  righteousness  had 
for  him  little  ethical  or  religious  significance.  At  the  best 
it  was  a  provisional  arrangement,  "  a  schoolmaster  to  bring 
us  to  Christ,  that  we  might  be  justified  by  faith,"  since 
justification  by  works  was  out  of  the  question.  Notwith- 
standing the  fact  that  he  finds  in  Abraham  the  original 
example  of  righteousness  by  faith,  he  regards  pre-Christian 
mankind  as  "  shut  up  under  the  law  unto  the  faith  which 
should  afterwards  be  revealed "  (Gal.  iii.  23,  24).  The 
ministry  of  the  law  was  a  ministry  of  servitude,  of  con- 
demnation, and  of  death,  notwithstanding  the  declaration 
that  it  is  "spiritual,"  "holy  and  just  and  good"  (Rom. 
viii.  12,  14).  "Life,"  in  the  apostle's  sense  of  the  word, 
that  supernatural  endowment  of  the  man  who  is  justified 
by  faith,  and  possesses  the  divine  Spirit,  the  law  could  not 
bestow.  "  For,"  he  says,  "  if  there  had  been  a  law  given 
which  could  have  given  life,  verily,  righteousness  should 
have  been  by  the  law"  (Gal.  iii.  21).  It  is  evident,  then, 
that  if  Christ  did  not  come  to  transcend  the  law,  he  could 
have  for  the  apostle  no  spiritual  function  and  no  soterio- 
logical  office.  His  entire  faith  in  Christ  was  staked  upon 
a  belief  in  him  as  the  bearer  of  a  message  of  supernatural 
righteousness.  If  he  could  not  hold  to  the  latter,  he  must 
abandon  the  former.  Accordingly,  with  all  his  heait  and 
with  all  the  energy  of  a  profound  conviction  he  held  to  the 


3/8  THE    TEACHER 

belief  in  the  doctrine  that  righteousness  could  not  be 
acquired  by  ethical  effort,  but  must  be  the  gift  of  God 
through  Jesus  Christ.  His  reasoning  was  from  the  cross 
to  this  ethical  principle.  If  there  were  no  super- 
natural righteousness,  then  the  cross  was  vanity  and  a 
symbol  of  humiliation,  since  it  had  no  significance  if  the 
old  ethical  order  stood,  and  men  could  become  righteous 
by  works.  Salvation  is  by  "grace";  and,  exclaims  the 
apostle,  ''  I  do  not  frustrate  the  grace  of  God,  for  if  right- 
eousness come  by  the  law,  then  Christ  is  dead  in  vain  " 
(Gal.  ii.  2i).  Out  of  this  Christology  the  ethics  of  the 
Spirit  was  a  natural  and  necessary  growth. 

A  third  root  of  this  ethics  of  supernatural  grace  extends 
into  the  apostle's  soteriology.  Here  the  entire  scheme  is 
supernatural.  The  kingdom  is  soon  to  be  ushered  in  by 
the  miraculous  descent  of  the  Lord  Christ  from  heaven. 
The  matter  demands  haste.  There  is  no  room  for 
historical  development  and  the  perfection  of  a  race 
through  ages  of  evolution.  The  fortune  of  the  individual 
is  in  question.  The  kingdom  is  for  the  "elect"  whom 
God  "predestinated  to  be  conformed  to  the  image  of  His 
Son"  (Rom.  viii.  29).  This  personal  factor  gives  a  point 
and  intensity  to  the  apostle's  doctrine  of  salvation  which 
we  can  in  our  conditions  with  difficulty  appreciate,  but 
which  we  can  see  reproduced  in  the  fervour  and  strained 
emotion  of  those  people  who  still  believe  in  the  immediate 
personal  coming  of  Christ  with  the  apocalyptic  accompani- 
ments of  the  primitive-Christian  doctrine  of  "the  last 
things,"  and  who  gather  in  "ascension-robes  "  to  meet  him 
as  he  descends.  It  is  hardly  to  be  supposed  that  the 
apostle  believed  that  a  man  in  ethical  striving  after  a 
righteousness  by  works  could  do  no  virtuous  act,  and 
could  not  achieve  righteousness  to  any  degree.  This 
could   not    have   been    his  opinion,  unless  we  have   here 


ETHICS  379 

another  of  the  many  antinomies  of  his  thought.  The 
absolute  rejection  of  righteousness  by  works  is  certainly 
irreconcilable  with  the  declaration  that  some  gentiles  not 
having  the  law  **do  by  nature  the  things  contained  in  the 
law"  (Rom.  ii.  14)  —  an  expression  in  which  the  attain- 
ment of  complete  legal  righteousness  appears  to  be 
implied.  It  is  also  not  in  accord  with  his  assertion 
regarding  himself  that  prior  to  his  conversion,  when  the 
only  '^  justification  "  that  he  could  have  pleaded  was  that 
'*  by  works,"  he  was,  "  touching  the  righteousness  which  is 
in  the  law,  blameless "  (Phil.  iii.  6).  The  unqualified 
declaration  that  "  by  the  works  of  the  law  shall  no  .flesh  be 
justified"  (Gal.  ii.  16)  hardly  allows  the  supposition  that 
when  he  made  it  he  had  reference  only  to  the  mass  of 
men,  and  believed  that  he  himself  and  some  others  consti- 
tuted exceptions  to  the  principle.  In  the  same  verse  he 
includes  himself  among  those  who  have  "believed  in  Jesus 
Christ,  that  they  [we]  might  be  justified  by  faith  and  not 
by  the  works  of  the  law." 

But  whether  we  have  here  an  unresolvable  paradox  in 
the  apostle's  thought  or  not  does  not  concern  our  imme- 
diate purpose,  which  has  to  do  with  the  fact  that  in  all  his 
soteriological  declarations  he  proceeds  upon  the  principle 
that  a  supernatural  righteousness  is  alone  adequate. 
With  respect  to  salvation  or  admission  into  the  kingdom 
which  Christ  was  soon  coming  to  establish,  he  could  not 
have  allowed  that  any  man  could  attain  this  great  for- 
tune through  a  righteousness  gained  by  his  own  ethical 
endeavour.  A  partial  fulfilment  of  the  law  on  the  part 
of  one  to  whose  credit  might  be  placed  good  intentions 
and  an  honest,  earnest  purpose,  would  not  avail  along  with 
forgiveness  of  the  delinquencies.  Of  such  a  salvation, 
although  it  abounds  in  ethical  encouragement,  the  apostle 
gives  no  intimation.     When  the  heavenly  kingdom  should 


380  THE    TEACHER 

come  in  its  glory  and  purity,  its  gates  would  only  open  to 
the  perfect  —  to  those  who  possessed  ''the  righteousness 
which  is  of  God,"  and  whom  "the  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life 
in  Christ  Jesus  had  set  free  from  the  law  of  sin  and 
death."  The  apostle's  ideal  with  respect  to  his  elect 
believers  was  that  God  should  *'  establish  their  hearts  un- 
blamable in  holiness"  before  Him  .  .  .  "at  the  coming  of 
our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  with  all  his  saints  "  (i  Thess.  iii.  13). 
They  are  exhorted  to  a  "  perfecting  of  holiness  in  the  fear 
of  God"  (2  Cor.  vii.  i);  and  in  Col.  i.  28  his  thought  with 
reference  to  the  spiritual-ethical  preparation  for  the  king- 
dom is  expressed  by  the  writer  in  the  words  :  "  Warning 
every  man  and  teaching  every  man  in  all  wisdom,  that  we 
may  present  every  man  perfect  in  Christ  Jesus."  The 
ordinary  ethical  endeavour  of  men  to  attain  a  righteousness 
by  works,  in  which  along  with  a  necessarily  imperfect 
obedience  there  must  always  remain  something  to  be 
forgiven,  was  evidently  not  adapted  to  this  soteriology, 
whose  fundamental  condition  was  the  complete  atonement 
for  sin  effected  on  the  cross  and  a  corresponding  perfect 
righteousness  "  imputed  "  in  return  for  faith  on  the  part  of 
those  who  accepted  the  great  sacrifice.* 

*  Paul  took  quite  literally,  more  literally  than  the  prophets  or  Jesus,  the 
declaration  that  he  was  "  cursed  "  who  "  continueth  not  in  all  things  which  are 
written  in  the  book  of  the  law  to  do  them  "  (Gal.  iii.  lo).  He  was  in  accord 
with  the  Old  Testament  idea  in  the  doctrine  that  only  a  righteous  people 
should  inherit  the  kingdom  of  the  Messiah.  Compare  Isa.  xi.  9  :  "They  shall 
not  hurt  or  destroy  in  all  my  holy  mountain;  for  the  earth  shall  be  full  of  the 
knowledge  of  the  Lord  as  the  waters  cover  the  sea,"  and  see  Isa.  Ixv.  17. 
Not  only  the  believers  for  whom  the  kingdom  was  prepared  should  come  into 
"the  glorious  liberty"  of  the  age  to  come,  but  "the  whole  creation"  should 
be  delivered  from  its  groaning  and  travailing  and  its  "  bondage  of  corruption  " 
(Rom,  viii.  19-22).  To  the  question  which  Josephus  mentions  as  having 
agitated  the  Jewish  parties,  whether  the  righteousness  suitable  to  the  Messi- 
anic kingdom  would  be  effected  by  man  himself  or  by  God,  Paul  could  only 
answer,  by  Him  who  "  maketh  one  vessel  to  honour  and  another  to  dishonour  " 


ETHICS  381 

The  interruption  through  a  supernatural  principle  of  the 
natural  course  of  ethical  development  which  is  a  fundamen- 
tal premise  of  the  apostle's  teaching  is  illustrated  in  his 
exposition  of  the  new  life  "in  the  Spirit"  into  which  the 
believer  is  assumed  to  enter,  when  having  been  justified 
by  faith  he  attains  the  divine  sonship.  For  him  there  is 
deliverance  from  the  haunting  presence  and  accusation 
of  his  past  misdeeds.  His  faith  has  been  reckoned  or 
''imputed"  to  him  for  righteousness,  and  he  now  stands 
toward  God  in  a  relation  of  "justification"  which  has 
no  natural  connection  with  his  moral  conduct.  The  re- 
lation of  cause  and  effect  in  the  ethical  and  spiritual 
domain  is  entirely  ignored.  This  doctrine  is  explicitly 
laid  down  in  the  words:  "There  is  now  therefore  no 
condemnation  for  those  who  are  in  Christ  Jesus,  who 
walk  not  after  the  flesh  but  after  the  Spirit.  For  the 
law  of  the  Spirit  of  life  in  Christ  Jesus  hath  made  me 
free  from  the  law  of  sin  and  death"  (Rom,  viii.  i,  2). 
In  the  ethical  condition  in  which  a  man  endeavours  to 
attain  by  struggle  and  self-conquest  a  righteousness  of 
his  own,  a  righteousness  which  is  "according  to  works," 
and  is  a  matter  of  "merit,"  he  is  under  "the  law  of  sin 
and  death."  This  kind  of  righteousness  being  conceived 
by  the  apostle  as  unattainable,  that  is,  as  not  meeting 
the  requirements  of  his  dogmatic  Christology  and  soteri- 
ology,  he  assumes  a  miraculous  transfer  of  the  believer 
into  a  relation  to  God  in  which  "condemnation  "  falls  away 
so  far  as  he  is  personally  concerned  ;  for  God,  seeing  that 
man  could  not  attain  righteousness  under  the  law  on  ac- 
count of  its  being  "weak  through  the  flesh,"  visited  the 
condemnation  of  sin  upon  the  flesh  of  Christ,  and  accord- 

(Rom.  ix.  21).  It  was  He  who  would  "create  the  new  heavens  and  the  new 
earth."  The  righteousness  of  the  coming  kingdom  was  as  miraculous  as  the 
deliverance  of  the  groaning  creation. 


382  THE    TEACHER 

ingly  holds  him  who  accepts  this  atonement  as  no  longer 
subject  to  penalty.  He  has  a  part  in  the  great  sacrifice  on 
the  cross  by  reason  of  the  representative  position  assigned 
to  Christ  in  the  Pauline  teaching,  and  his  relation  thereto 
is  expressed  in  the  declaration  which  Paul  makes  in  his 
discussion  with  Peter  at  Antioch  :  ''I  am  crucified  with 
Christ.  Nevertheless  I  live  ;  yet  not  I,  but  Christ  liveth 
in  me ;  and  the  life  which  I  now  live  in  the  flesh  I  live 
by  the  faith  of  the  Son  of  God,  who  loved  me,  and  gave 
himself  for  me"  (Gal.  ii.  20). 

In  the  place  of  the  natural  life  of  ethical  endeavour  to 
attain  a  righteousness  by  works  the  believer  has  the  super- 
natural life  of  the  indwelling  Christ,  who  in  ''giving  him- 
self for  him  "  broke  his  connection  with  the  old  moral 
order,  and  transferred  him  into  the  relation  of  justification 
by  faith  and  into  the  new  order  of  "  the  law  of  the  Spirit 
of  life."  From  this  point  of  view  it  is  not  surprising  to 
find  a  considerable  number  of  passages  in  which  the  per- 
sonal activity  and  achievement  of  the  believer  appear  at  a 
minimum  or  are  altogether  ignored,  and  also  to  note  that 
the  apostle  does  not  at  all  recognise  virtue  in  the  abstract 
in  the  sense  of  a  personal  attainment  or  an  ethical  accom- 
plishment. On  the  contrary,  the  indwelling  Spirit,  Christ, 
and  God  are  the  effective  forces  of  his  life.  Accordingly, 
the  apostle  says  to  the  Philippians  that  he  is  confident  that 
"  He  who  hath  begun  a  good  work  in  you  will  perform  it 
until  the  day  of  Jesus  Christ  "  (Phil.  i.  6).  To  the  Thessa- 
lonians  he  writes  of  reciprocal  love  not  as  if  it  were  to  be 
attained  by  self-culture,  watchfulness,  and  the  subjection 
of  hostile  sentiments,  but  he  calls  upon  the  Lord,  that  is, 
Christ,  to  "  make  them  increase  and  abound  in  love  one  to 
another  and  to  all  men,"  to  the  end  that  they  may  be  un- 
blamable at  the  coming  of  Jesus  Christ  (i  Thess.  iii.  13). 
The  condition  of  being  out  of  the  flesh  and  in  the  Spirit  is 


ETHICS  3S3 

due  to  no  achievement  of  which  a  man  can  ''boast"  as  of 
a  ''merit,"  but  solely  to  the  fact  that  one  has  dwelling  in 
one  "the  Spirit  of  God"  (Rom.   viii.   9).     By   the    same 
Spirit,  that  is,  by  a  supernatural  agency,  the  believers  are 
"washed,"    "sanctified,"    and   "justified "  (i  Cor.   vi.    11). 
The  mortification  of  "the  deeds  of  the  body  "   is  effected 
"through  the  Spirit"  (Rom.  viii.  14),  while  the  expression, 
"  if  ye  mortify,"  appears   to  imply  free  personal  activity, 
and  the  passage  may  be   regarded  as  denoting  that  the 
activity  of  the  individual  is  subordinate  to   and  through 
that  of   the    divine    Spirit.       A    similar  point    of  view  is 
represented  in  the  passage   in  which  the  Ust  of   ethical 
virtues  is  given  as  "fruits  of  the  Spirit,"  that  is,  the  human 
activities  which  the  indwelling  Spirit  of  God  produces  in 
the  believer  (Gal.  v.  22-24).     In  the  eighteenth  verse  the 
believers  are  addressed  as  persons  impelled  or  led  by  the 
Spirit,  as  if  their  personal  autonomy  were  at   least  sub- 
ordinate,  while   in   verse    25    they    are    exhorted,    since 
they  "live  in  the  Spirit,"  to  "walk  by  the  Spirit"  — an 
expression  in  which,  if  not  their  initiative,  at  least  their 
effective  activity  is   implied.     But   the  Spirit  is  generally 
conceived  as  the  dominant  factor.* 

*  Alongside  the  doctrine  of  supernatural  grace,  or  as  "  a  series  of  under- 
tones "  to  it,  there  is  maintained  the  ethical  point  of  view  of  personal  endeavour. 
Not  only  did  Christ  "  die  for  all,"  so  that  the  "  past "  trespasses  of  the  believers 
are  "  not  imputed  "  to  them,  but  also  the  apostle  does  not  wish  to  be  under- 
stood as  teaching  that  "by  reason  of  this  vicarious  death  a  purely  passive  rble 
is  assigned  to  those  in  whose  place  it  was  accomplished."  Christ  died  for  all, 
"  that  they  who  live  should  not  henceforth  live  to  themselves,  but  to  him  who 
died  for  them  and  rose  again  "  (2  Cor.  v.  14-21).  Although  by  reason  of  the 
supernatural  "  law  of  the  Spirit  of  life,"  the  believer  theoretically  sins  no  more, 
yet  this  inward  principle  is  conceived  as  a  spur  to  ethical  effort,  an  ethical 
ideal,  and  an  ethical  power  (Gal.  v.  24,  25;  Rom.  viii.  13).  While  the  appel- 
lation ''  saints "  (aTiOi)  theoretically  denotes  those  who  are  "  called  "  or  set 
apart  without  regard  to  their  ethical  performance,  Holtzmann  finds  that  the 
designation  indicates  also  a  -task,"  and  "sounds  like  a  requirement  directed 


384  THE    TEACHER 

This  injunction  to  "walk  in  the  Spirit"  indicates  a  dis- 
tinct ethical  ideal  toward  which  the  believer  should  strive. 
The  apostle  reminds  the  Thessalonians  that  in  his  preach- 
ing to  them  he  had  "exhorted  and  charged"  them,  "as  a 
father  doth  his  children,"  that  they  "  should  walk  worthy 
of  God  "  who  had  called  them  to  His  kingdom  and  glory" 
(i  Thess.  ii.  11,  12).  Despite  the  fact  that  every  believer 
is  assumed  according  to  a  fundamental  principle  of  the 
apostle's  soteriology  to  possess  the  supernatural  imputed 
righteousness,  the  practical  righteousness  which  is  attained 
by  ethical  endeavour  is  held  up  as  an  ideal  which  Christians 
ought  to  strive  to  attain.  The  body  should  be  "  presented 
as  a  living  sacrifice,"  and  the  "  members "  should  not  be 
yielded  as  "instruments  of  unrighteousness  unto  sin,"  but 
as  "instruments  of  righteousness  unto  God"  (Rom.  vi.  13, 
xii.  i).  His  "good  and  acceptable  and  perfect  will"  is 
the  supreme  standard  which  they  will  "prove"  who  are 
not  conformed  to  this  world,  but  are  "  transformed  by  the 
renewing  of  their  mind  "  (Rom.  xii.  2).  Even  "the  right- 
eousness of  the  law  "  which  was  repeatedly  declared  to  be 
unattainable  in  the  natural  course  of  ethical  endeavour 
receives  recognition  at  last,  and  is  represented  as  the  ob- 
ject in  view  in  the  scheme  of  atonement.  God  sent  His 
Son  for  sin,  and  condemned  it  in  his  flesh,  "that  the 
righteousness  of  the  law  might  be  fulfilled  in  us,  who 
walk  not  after  the  flesh,  but  after  the  Spirit "  (Rom.  viii. 
4,  5).     Although  the  believers  in  virtue  of  their  "faith" 

to  those  so  called  to  become  ethically  what  they  already  are  religiously." 
There  remains  yet  to  be  satisfactorily  pointed  out  the  "  psychological  media- 
tion," which  Schmeidel  regards  as  "  urgently  needed,"  "  between  the  objec- 
tively established  new  relation  of  man  to  God  and  the  former's  ethical 
conduct."  Holtzmann  finds  it  in  the  "love  of  God,"  which  in  the  hearts  in 
which  it  is  poured  out  "  calls  forth  love  to  men,  and  becomes  the  impelling 
force  of  all  Christian  virtues."  But  this  is  one  of  the  "  fruits  of  the  Spirit " 
(Gal.  V.  22),  and  hence  belongs  to  the  supernatural  realm. 


ETHICS  385 

already  possess  a  righteousness  not  of  works  which  has 
been  *'  imputed "  to  them,  are  adopted  as  sons  of  God, 
and  are  "led  by  the  Spirit,"  we  have  here  the  bold  para- 
dox that  there  is  still  a  righteousness  to  be  ''fulfilled" 
by  them,  and  that  ''the  righteousness  of  the  law."  Is 
there  in  the  apostle's  ethics  a  twofold  righteousness, 
one  imputed  and  one  achieved  ;  or  has  he  here  as  else- 
where abandoned  the  dogmatic  imputed  righteousness  in 
favour  of  the  real  righteousness,  of  which  according  to  the 
traditions  of  his  race  he  should  have  been  the  advocate  ? 
Neither  supposition  furnishes  a  satisfactory  explanation  of 
the  paradox.  In  any  case  the  ground  of  supernaturalism 
is  not  abandoned.  If  the  righteousness  of  the  law  is  ful- 
filled in  the  believers,  it  is  precisely  because  they  have  the 
supernatural  endowment  of  the  Spirit,  and  can  achieve 
what  was  impossible  to  the  natural  man. 

The  extreme  ground  taken  in  the  elaboration  of  the  doc- 
trine of  righteousness  by  grace  is  not,  however,  maintained 
with  entire  consistency  throughout  even  in  the  immediate 
connection  of  the  passages  in  which  it  is  stated  (cf.  Rom. 
vi.  6,  7,  18,  with  I,  12,  13,  15).  The  exigencies  of  practi- 
cal life  subject  the  theory  of  a  supernatural  righteousness 
to  a  rude  test,  and  show  its  weakness.  "All  the  law  is," 
indeed,  "fulfilled  in  one  word,  thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbour 
as  thyself,"  and  the  believers  as  possessors  of  the  Spirit 
which  has  "shed  abroad  the  love  of  God  in  their  hearts  " 
should  spontaneously  fulfil  it.  But  the  apostle  reminds 
them  of  the  peril  which  they  run  in  biting  and  devouring 
one  another,  and  admonishes  them  to  "walk  in  the  Spirit," 
and  not  to  "fulfil  the  lusts  of  the  flesh,"  as  if  they  were, 
without  his  and  their  own  watchfulness,  in  danger  of  a 
lapse   (Gal.   v.    14-16).*      The    solicitude  implied   in   the 

*  The  attitude  of  the  apostle  toward  "  the  flesh,"  his  rigorous  dealing  with 
the  incestuous  person,  and  his  admonitions  against  fornication  denote  a  great 

2C 


386  THE    TEACHER 

words,  "if  ye  live  after  the  flesh,"  is  incompatible  with  the 
doctrine  that  the  believer  in  his  supernatural  connection 
with  Christ  in  his  death  has  "■  crucified  the  flesh  with  its 
affections  and  lusts"  (Rom.  viii.  13;  Gal.  v.  24).  The 
earnest  admonitions  in  all  the  Epistles  proceed  upon  the 
presumption  that  the  supernatural  "grace"  is  not  "suffi- 
cient "  for  the  stress  of  life,  since  those  who  possess  it  need 
to  be  put  on  their  guard  like  other  men  against  fornication 
and  the  defrauding  of  one  another  (i  Thess.  iv.  '^-j\  Thus 
the  ethical  principle  of  righteousness  by  works,  which  was 
so  vehemently  repudiated  in  theory,  comes  to  its  rights  at 
last.  While  the  apostle  gives  no  prominence  to  the  details 
of  the  life  of  Christ,  and  may  be  said  in  general  to  have 
disregarded  them,  spiritual  fellowship  with  and  likeness  to 
him  are  presented  as  ethical  ideals.  The  divine  foreordina- 
tion  is  conceived  as  directed  to  the  conformity  of  the  elect 
to  the  image  of  Christ  (Rom.  viii.  29),  and  the  Corinthians 
are  exhorted  to  be  imitators  of  the  apostle  as  he  is  an  imi- 
tator of  Christ  (i  Cor.  xi.  i  ;  see  i  Thess.  i.  6).  To  the 
Philippians  he  writes  :  "  Let  this  mind  be  in  you  which 
was  also  in  Christ  Jesus,"  that  is,  the  spirit  of  self-renoun- 
cing service,  just  as  benevolence  is  enjoined  upon  the  Corin- 
thians by  reference  to  the  grace  of  him  who  though  rich, 
for  man's  sake  became  poor  (2  Cor.  viii.  9).  He  is  in  tra- 
vail of  the  Galatians  until  Christ  be  formed  in  them  (Gal. 
iv.  19),  and  his  deepest  feeling  with  reference  to  his  own 
relation  to  Jesus  is  that  expressed  in  connection  with  his 
controversy  with    Peter :    "  I    am  crucified    with    Christ  ; 

advance  beyond  the  ethics  of  the  Stoics,  who  placed  so  much  stress  upon  the 
individual's  indifference  to  externals  and  upon  the  disposition  out  of  which 
actions  proceeded  that  they  theoretically  allowed  an  ethical  laxity  offensive 
to  the  moral  sense  of  mankind.  The  moral  character,  however,  of  the 
great  representatives  of  this  school  is  conceded  to  have  been  above  re- 
proach. 


ETHICS  387 

nevertheless   I  live  ;    yet  not  I,  but  Christ  liveth  in  me  " 
(Gal.  ii.  20). 

The  ethical  motive  is  not  as  explicitly  stated  as  the  ideal, 
and  in  order  to  determine  what  it  was  conceived  to  be  sev- 
eral passages  must  be  analysed.  A  grateful  response  to 
the  love  of  Christ  finds  expression  in  several  places,  but  it 
does  not  appear  distinctly  as  a  motive,  as  some  suppose, 
in  Gal.  ii.  20.  Christ's  love  for  men,  his  self-devotion  which 
prompted  him  to  leave  for  a  time  the  glory  of  his  preexist- 
ent  state  and  to  ''become  poor"  for  man's  sake  (2  Cor. 
viii.  9),  to  ''die  for  the  ungodly,"  and  to  "give  himself  for 
our  sins  "  (Rom.  v.  6 ;  Gal.  i.  4),  is  represented  as  "  con- 
straining "  the  apostle  in  his  zeal  for  the  brethren  and  as 
a  reason  why  "they  who  live  should  not  live  henceforth  to 
themselves,  but  to  him  who  died  for  them  "  (2  Cor.  v.  14, 
15).  A  recognition  of  God's  goodness  in  the  rational  ser- 
vice of  the  control  of  the  body  is  expressed  in  Rom.  xii.  i. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  fear  of  God  frequently  appears  as 
a  motive  for  abstaining  from  acts  which  will  incur  the  di- 
vine disapproval.  The  apostle  admonishes  the  Thessalo- 
nians  that  "  no  man  go  beyond  and  defraud  his  brother  in 
any  matter  because  the  Lord  is  the  avenger  of  all  such  " 
(i  Thess.  iv.  6).  He  says  that  his  persuasion  of  men  is 
founded  upon  his  knowledge  of  "the  terror  of  the  Lord" 
(2  Cor.  V.  11),  and  admonishes  the  Corinthians  to  perfect 
themselves  in  holiness  "  in  the  fear  of  God  "  (2  Cor.  viii,  i). 
"  The  terror  of  the  Lord  "  is  set  forth  in  the  declaration 
that  at  the  Parousia,  when  "  the  day  of  the  lord  so  cometh 
as  a  thief  in  the  night,"  "sudden  destruction  shall  come 
upon  them  "  who  cry  peace  and  safety,  "as  travail  upon  a 
woman  with  child,  and  they  shall  not  escape"  (i  Thess.  v. 
2,  3).  In  connection  with  the  admonition,  "  Take  heed 
lest  he  spare  not  thee,"  "the  goodness  and  severity  of 
God"   are  presented  as  motives  to  fidelity,  in  other  words, 


388  THE    TEACHER 

reward  and  penalty  are  set  forth  as  incentive  and  deterrent 
with  respect  to  belief  and  unbelief.  Not  only  is  this  salva- 
tion to  be  "  worked  out "  even  by  those  who  have  already 
become  subjects  of  the  supernatural  grace,  but  it  must  be 
done  ''with  fear  and  trembling"  (Phil.  ii.  12). 

Reward,  and  especially  the  eschatological  reward  or  the 
blessedness  that  the  believer  expected  to  enjoy  when 
Christ  should  come  again  in  glory  to  establish  his  kingdom 
(the  Parousia),  holds  a  prominent  place  among  the  motives 
which  the  apostle  represents  as  influencing  him,  and  which 
he  sets  before  the  Christians  to  whom  he  writes.  Accord- 
ingly he  writes  to  the  Corinthians  :  "  We  labour,  that, 
whether  present  or  absent,  we  may  be  accepted  of  him. 
P'orwe  must  all  appear  before  the  judgment-seat  of  Christ, 
that  every  one  may  receive  the  things  done  in  his  body  " 
(2  Cor.  V.  9,  10).  He  prays  that  the  Thessalonians  may 
be  made  to  abound  in  love  to  one  another  and  to  all  men, 
to  the  end  that  they  may  be  "  unblamable  in  holiness  at 
the  coming  of  Jesus  Christ  with  all  his  saints  "  (i  Thess.  iii. 
13).  To  the  same  church  he  sends  the  exhortation  to  be 
sober  and  put  on  the  breastplate  of  faith  and  love,  because 
God  has  appointed  them  to  obtain  salvation,  and  finally  in 
his  kingdom  to  live  together  with  Christ,  whether  they  die 
before  it  comes,  or  survive  its  advent  (i  Thess.  v.  8-10). 
The  same  eschatological  motive  is  manifest  as  crowning 
and  completing  the  motives  derived  from  the  spread  of  the 
gospel,  the  being  all  things  to  all  men  in  order  to  save 
some,  where  in  i  Cor.  ix.  25-27  the  apostle  represents  that 
all  his  striving  in  his  missionary  work  is  to  the  end  that  he 
may  "obtain  an  incorruptible  crown."  Fear  also  has  a  part 
here,  for  he  declares  that  he  keeps  his  body  in  subjection, 
lest  he  should  be  a  castaway.  "  Troubled  on  every  side  " 
and  persecuted,  he  could  be  strong,  and  hold  fast  his  faith, 
knowing  that  He  who  raised  up  the  Lord  Jesus  would  raise 


ETHICS  389 

him  up  also,  and  that  *'  the  Ught  affliction  which  is  but  for 
a  moment  worketh  for  him  a  far  more  exceeding  and  eter- 
nal weight  of  glory."  Accordingly,  his  gaze  was  fixed  upon 
the  things  that  are  eternal,  in  which  was  his  everlasting 
reward  (2  Cor.  iv.  8,  14-18  ;  see  also  Rom.  xiii.  12  ;  i  Cor. 
iii.  8,  14,  iv.  5,  ix.  23,  xv.  32;  Phil.  ii.  16;  2  Cor.  i.  14).* 

The  ethics  of  marriage  receives  no  distinctive  treatment 
at  the  hands  of  the  apostle,  what  he  says  on  the  subject 
having  reference  to  special  exigencies  or  to  a  theological 
theme  which  he  wishes  to  illustrate.  His  treatment  of 
divorce  comes  far  short  of  the  comprehensiveness  and  pre- 
cision of  Jesus'  teachings  on  the  subject.  In  Rom.  vii.  2,  3 
he  speaks  by  way  of  illus.tration  of  man's  relation  to  the 
law  only  of  the  wife  as  *'  bound  to  her  husband  as  long  as 
he  lives  "  and  as  an  adulteress  if  she  marry  another  man 
during  his  life  ;  and  in  i  Cor.  vii.  10-16  he  lays  down  the 
general  principle  that  a  wife  is  not  to  depart  from  her  hus- 
band, and  the  husband  is  not  to  put  away  his  wife.      This 

*  The  passage  i  Cor.  xv.  32  has  been  considered  in  Chapter  VI  with  respect 
to  the  interpretation  of  the  fighting  with  beasts.  Here  we  have  to  do  with  its 
ethical  aspect.  "  After  the  manner  of  a  man  "  (/caret  AvOpojirov)  means,  in  the 
manner  of  a  man  who  knows  nothing  of  a  future  Hfe,  or  for  whom  there  is  no 
resurrection  of  the  dead.  Of  what  use  is  it  to  have  exposed  myself  to  mortal 
peril  for  my  cause?  If  there  is  no  resurrection  of  the  dead,  let  us  eat  and 
drink,  for  to-morrow  we  die.  The  meaning  is  that  he  did  not  expose  himself 
at  Ephesus  after  the  manner  of  a  man  for  whom  there  is  no  future  life.  To 
such  a  man  there  would  have  been  wanting  the  courage  to  sacrifice  himself 
for  an  ideal,  and  he  would  say,  "  Let  us  rather  eat  and  drink."  This  is  the 
KaTa-dpdp(x}irov  point  of  view.  If  the  belief  in  the  resurrection  overcomes  it, 
it  is  not  because  it  furnishes  a  motive  to  sacrifice  one's  self  for  the  sake  of  in- 
tegrity and  duty,  but  one  adequate  to  produce  the  needed  courage  and  devo- 
tion. More  than  this  does  not  appear  to  lie  in  the  passage.  Whether  a  man  of 
Paul's  nature  would  have  fought  with  beasts  at  Ephesus  if  there  were  for  him 
no  resurrection  of  the  dead  is  another  matter.  Schmiedel  thinks  Paul  could 
as  little  have  followed  the  principle  in  question  as  Spinoza,  Schleiermacher,  or 
Biedermann.  In  I  Cor.  ix.  1 6  the  apostle  represents  himself  as  pursuing  his 
calling  from  an  inner  "  necessity." 


390  THE    TEACHER 

is  said  as  a  word  of  the  Lord,  although  it  has  not  the 
qualification  as  to  fornication  which  Jesus  allows  (Matt. 
V.  32,  xix.  9).  His  further  discussion  of  the  subject,  in 
which  he  professes  to  speak  without  authority,  denotes 
a  departure  from  the  unqualified  prohibition  of  divorce  in 
verses  10  and  11,  and  forbids  separation  in  marriages  of 
believing  and  unbelieving  parties  only  when  the  unbeliev- 
ing party  to  the  contract  is  ''pleased  to  dwell"  with  the 
other. 

With  respect  to  marriage  in  itself  the  apostle's  teaching 
is  a  consistent  conclusion  from  the  doctrine  that  the  flesh, 
the  seat  of  sin,  was  slain  in  the  believer's  crucifixion  with 
Christ,  and  that  if  he  would  "live"  he  must  "mortify  the 
deeds  of  the  body  "  (Rom.  viii.  13).  From  the  premises 
that  the  Christian  has  "  crucified  the  flesh  with  its  affec- 
tions and  lusts,"  and  that  the  reaping  of  "corruption"  is 
the  result  of  "sowing  to  the  flesh  "  (Gal.  v.  24,  vi.  8),  legiti- 
mately follows  an  ascetic  view  of  life.*  Accordingly,  it  is 
not  surprising  that  in  answer  to  a  question  on  the  subject 
from  the  Corinthians,  we  find  him  advocating  entire  absti- 
nence from  the  sexual  relation  in  the  sweeping  proposition 
that  "it  is  good  for  a  man  not  to  touch  a  woman"  (i  Cor. 
yii.  i).  This  can  only  mean  that  celibacy  is  preferable  as 
the  rule  of  the  Christian  life  to  the  marriage  relation.  For 
the  apostle  proceeds  to  say  that  marriage  may  be  allowed  as 
a  preventive  of  fornication,  or  in  other  words,  may  be  tole- 
rated as  the  less  of  two  evils  (verses  2,  9),  and  that  it  is 
"good"  for  "the  unmarried  and  widows  "   "if  they  abide 

*  This  point  of  view  obtains  in  I  Cor.  vii.  5,  according  to  which  the  sexual 
relation  is  incompatible  with  private  religious  exercises  ("  prayer  and  fasting"), 
and  for  their  sake  should  be  suspended  "  for  a  time  "  by  mutual  consent.  The 
suspension  should,  however,  be  only  temporary  by  reason  of  the  danger  of  a 
temptation  through  Satan  on  account  of  the  assumed  "  incontinency  "  {aKpaata) 
of  the  persons  addressed. 


ETHICS  391 

even  as  he,"  that  is,  in  a  state  of  celibacy.  The  directions 
regarding  the  "  due  benevolence "  of  husband  and  wife 
toward  each  other  are  evidently  given  with  reference  to  the 
preventing  of  promiscuous  sexual  relations.  All  this,  he 
says,  he  speaks  "by  permission  and  not  of  commandment," 
although  it  would  seem  that  a  "pneumatic,"  a  man  in 
possession  of  "  the  Spirit,"  should  regard  himself  as  en- 
titled at  all  times  to  speak  with  authority.  He  appears  to 
have  regarded  himself  as  possessing  besides  the  other 
"gifts  of  the  Spirit"  that  of  abstinence  from  the  sexual 
relation,  and  the  inference  from  verse  7  is  that  every  one 
who  has  this  "gift"  ought  to  abstain  from  marriage  on 
the  theory  that  the  marriage  relation  is  to  be  allowed  only 
when,  according  to  verse  9,  a  greater  evil  may  be  pre- 
vented by  entering  into  it. 

Although  on  good  ethical  grounds  the  apostle  opposes 
the  separation  of  the  married,  he  regards  the  relation  as 
unfavourable  to  such  a  service  of  the  Lord  as  he  required  of 
the  believers,  whom  he  would  have  without  domestic  cares 
(verse  32).  The  married  "have  trouble  in  the  flesh" 
(verse  28),  and  the  woman  who  is  married  "careth  for  the 
things  of  the  world,  how  she  may  please  her  husband," 
while  "the  unmarried  careth  for  the  things  of  the  Lord 
that  she  may  be  holy  both  in  body  and  in  spirit  "  (verse  34) 
—  a  remark  from  which  it  may  be  inferred  that  he  re- 
garded the  holiness  "in  body  and  spirit"  of  the  married 
woman  as  difficult,  if  not  doubtful.  He  who  giveth  not  his 
daughter  in  marriage  does  "better"  than  he  who  allows 
her  to  marry,  and  she  is  happier  if  she  abide  unmarried  — 
a  declaration  for  which  the  apostle  "thinks"  he  has  "the 
Spirit  of  God  "  (verses  38,  40).  It  is  evident  that  he  had 
no  such  conception  of  the  sacredness  of  the  marriage  re- 
lation as  a  means  of  spiritual  culture  and  of  the  home  as 
a  factor  in   the   ethical   life   of    men   as   has  happily   pre- 


392 


THE    TEACHER 


vailed  in  protestant  Christendom.*  This  limitation  of  his 
ethics  was  in  part  due  to  his  eschatological  expectations 
and  to  the  consequent  curtailment  of  his  historical  per- 
spective ;  and  it  should  also  be  borne  in  mind  that,  as 
Weizsacker  remarks,  his  ''view  is  deeply  involved  with  his 
doctrine  of  the  flesh,  in  accord  with  the  judgment  on  the 
life  of  the  senses  which  was  at  the  time  widely  prevalent 
also  in  heathenism  among  the  better  classes."  To  him 
"the  time  was  short,  and  it  remaineth  that  those  who  have 
wives  be  as  though  they  had  none  "  (verse  29),  otherwise 
he  could  not  have  expressed  the  wish  that  ''all  men" 
should  remain  unmarried — an  idea  which  Holtzmann 
characterises  as  "a  monstrosity,  expressing  the  self-anni- 
hilation of  mankind  and  the  extreme  consequence  of  a 
pessimistic  view  of  life."f 

The  direction  regarding  woman's  praying  or  prophesy- 
ing in  the  religious  assemblies  with  her  head  uncovered 
was  doubtless  given  in  answer  to  questions  that  had  been 

*  "  So  far  as  it  is  a  question  of  advice  to  such  as  had  the  gift  of  continence 
and  of  theoretical  approval  in  reference  to  all  (with  reservation  of  the  practical 
hindrance  of  aicpaaia)  the  Catholic  Church  rightly  claims  Paul  for  itself." 
Schmiedel  in  Hand-  Co?nmeiitar  on  i  Cor.  vii.  40. 

t  Among  the  Stoics  Epictetus  held  an  opinion  regarding  marriage  analogous 
to  Paul's.  He  advises  the  philosopher  to  abstain  from  marriage  and  the 
procreation  of  children.  While  in  a  state  composed  of  the  wise  he  might  do 
this,  it  is  different  in  the  existing  situation,  in  which  the  true  philosopher 
ought  not  to  be  involved  in  personal  relations  and  occupations  which  might 
withdraw  him  from  the  service  of  the  Divinity.  The  Stoics  in  general  main- 
tained, however,  that  a  man  should  not  withdraw  himself  from  the  service  of 
the  state  or  miss  any  opportunity  of  taking  part  in  its  affairs  in  order  to  promote 
the  good  and  hinder  the  bad.  Accordingly,  he  ought  not  to  scorn  marriage, 
and  should  neither  withhold  himself  from  such  a  natural  and  intimate  fellow- 
ship, nor  deprive  the  state  of  posterity  and  human  society  of  an  example  of  a 
so  beautiful  family-life.  Wife  and  children  belong  to  the  perfection  of  life  and 
of  the  home.  The  citizen  owes  children  to  the  state,  and  family-love  is  of  all 
the  purest.  See  Zeller,  Die  Philosophie  der  Griechen^  etc.,  iii.  i,  pp.  176, 
177. 


ETHICS  393 

sent  to  the  apostle  from  the  Corinthians  or  with  reference 
to  conditions  which  he  knew  to  exist  among  them.  If 
there  was  a  tendency  in  the  church  toward  a  recognition 
of  the  equaUty  of  the  sexes  in  the  religious  worship,  at 
least,  it  was  more  in  accordance  with  his  doctrine  that  in 
Christ  ''there  is  neither  male  nor  female"  (Gal.  iii.  28) 
than  his  own  attitude  in  i  Cor.  xi.  3-15,  which  is  evi- 
dently a  logical  consequence  of  the  principle  of  the  sub- 
ordination of  woman  to  man.  In  fact,  this  is  the  chief 
reason  assigned  for  the  direction,  the  fundamental  motive 
of  the  entire  section,  which  begins  with  the  declaration  that 
Christ  is  the  head  of  the  woman  only  secondarily,  that  is, 
through  the  man  (verse  3),  and  the  doctrine  is  reasserted 
in  the  words  :  "for  the  man  is  not  of  the  woman,  but  the 
woman  of  the  man,  neither  was  the  man  created  for  the 
woman,  but  the  woman  for  the  man  "  (verses  8,  9).  He 
continues  :  **  For  this  cause  ought  the  woman  to  have  power 
on  her  head,  because  of  the  angels,"  that  is,  on  account 
of  her  subordination  to  man  she  ought  to  have  her  head 
covered  as  a  sign  of  his  power  over  her.  The  expression, 
''because  of  the  angels,"  seems  to  have  no  logical  connec- 
tion with  what  precedes,  since  "the  power  on  her  head" 
is  "for  this  reason,"  that  is,  on  account  of  what  is  said  in 
verses  8  and  9,  and  to  add  another  reason  entirely  foreign 
to  this  only  confuses  the  sense.  If  the  words  are  not 
spurious,  as  some  authorities  suppose  them  to  be,  then 
the  apostle  doubtless  meant  that  the  angels,  assumed  ac- 
cording to  Jewish  ideas  to  be  present  in  the  worshipping 
assemblies,  might  be  captivated  by  the  sight  of  the 
women  with  uncovered  heads  (Gen.  vi.  2).  In  any  case 
the  partial  concealment  of  the  heads  of  the  women  from 
the  sight  of  the  men  in  the  assembly  was  not  improbably 
a  motive  for  the  direction.  For  the  later  post-Pauline 
development  of   the  doctrine  of   women's   subordination, 


394 


THE    TEACHER 


see  Eph.  v.  22,  23;  i  Tim.  ii.  11-15;  Tit.  ii.  5  ;  i  Pet. 
iii.  I.* 

With  respect  to  the  existing  social  order  in  general,  it 
did  not  enter  into  the  apostle's  thought,  which  was  fixed 
upon  the  approaching  end  of  the  world,  to  undertake  radi- 
cal reforms.  If  he  thought  slavery  was  wrong,  and  ought 
to  be  abolished,  he  gives  no  hint  of  such  an  opinion.  On 
the  contrary,  he  exhorts  that  "  every  man  abide  in  the 
same  calling  wherein  he  was  called.  Art  thou  called  being 
a  servant }  Care  not  for  it ;  but  if  thou  mayest  be 
made  free,  use  it  rather  [that  is,  to  serve  the  Lord  in  this 
condition].  For  he  that  is  called  in  the  Lord,  being  a 
servant,  is  the  Lord's  freeman"  (i  Cor.  vii.  20,  21).  In 
returning  Onesimus  to  Philemon,  he  has  nothing  to  say 
of  the  evils  of  slavery,  and  does  not  ask  for  his  liberation, 
but  only  for  a  kindly  reception  and  a  fraternal  adjustment. 

With  regard  to  the  ethics  of  the  individual's  relation  to 
the  state  the  apostle  recognises  the  latter  as  an  "  ordinance 
of  God,"  since  He  is  the  source  of  all  power.  Resistance 
to  the  power  is  resistance  to  the  ordinance  of  God,  for 

*  The  subordination  of  women  is  most  decidedly  expressed  in  I  Cor.  xiv. 
34  f.  where  the  apostle  writes  to  the  Corinthians  that  their  women  should 
"  keep  silence  in  the  churches  and  be  under  obedience,  ...  as  also  saith  the 
law  "  (Gen.  iii.  i6),  and  that  "  it  is  a  shame  for  them  to  speak  in  the  church." 
This  passage  is  the  more  surprising  in  that  the  apostle  had  previously  in  chapter 
xi.  tacitly  permitted  women  to  pray  or  prophesy  on  condition  that  they  were 
veiled,  and  may  be  said  to  have  sanctioned  both  subject  to  that  restriction. 
There  is  no  indication  that  he  had  different  kinds  of  religious  assemblies  in 
view  in  the  two  instances,  or  that  in  the  latter  case  he  intended  only  to  forbid 
the  women  to  ask  questions.  If  when  Paul  wrote  xi.  2-16  he  had  intended 
afterwards  to  make  this  sweeping  prohibition,  he  must,  as  Schmiedel  remarks, 
have  inserted  in  the  former  passage  a  qualification  as  to  the  special  kind  of 
religious  assembly  in  view,  if  such  a  qualification  was  in  his  mind.  Here  the 
women  are  permitted  neither  to  speak  nor  to  ask  questions,  but  as  to  the 
latter  matter  they  are  told  to  inquire  of  their  husbands  at  home  "  if  they  will 
learn  anything."  If  the  passage  is  not  a  later  addition  to  the  text,  as  some  sup- 
pose it  to  be,  it  is  irreconcilable  with  the  manifest  intention  of  chapter  xi.  2-16. 


ETHICS  395 

which  those  who  resist  shall  receive  ''damnation."  It  is 
evident  that  in  deriving  the  doctrine  of  the  state  and  the 
subject's  relation  to  it  from  the  principle  of  divine  right, 
he  reached  conclusions  not  in  accord  with  political  condi- 
tions then  existing  or  likely  to  exist.  The  Roman  power 
in  his  time  could  not  be  characterised  as  ''  not  a  terror  to 
good  works,  but  to  evil,"  and  "a  minister  of  God"  to  men 
"for  good."  The  whole  construction  is  without  a  practical 
basis,  the  declarations  are  sweeping  and  unqualified,  and 
no  provision  is  made  for  emergencies  in  which  the  right- 
eous indignation  of  men  swayed  by  a  sense  of  justice  and 
a  passion  for  liberty  becomes  a  "  terror  "  to  "  the  powers 
that  be."  In  fact,  the  historical  struggle  for  liberty  has 
been  a  struggle  against  the  Pauline  doctrine  of  the  divine 
ordination  of  the  ruling  powers  of  the  state.  If  it  had 
been  in  the  apostle's  manner  to  give  advice  to  the  Chris- 
tians of  his  time  regarding  their  relation  to  the  state 
without  laying  down  an  a  priori  ^oqXxxwq  of  the  state,  the 
counsel  which  he  gives  in  Rom.  xiii.  1-7  would  have  been 
wise  ;  for  it  is  evident  that  the  existence  of  the  primitive 
church  depended,  as  Pfleiderer  has  pointed  out,  upon  its  not 
assuming  the  role  of  the  reformer  and  revolutionist  with 
reference  to  the  social  and  political  order.  Yet  gentile 
Christians  in  Corinth  are  commanded  not  to  recognise 
the  civil  courts,  but  to  set  up  a  tribunal  of  ''saints" 
before  which  they  may  "go  to  law,"  because  "the  saints 
will  judge  the  world  and  even  angels"  (i  Cor.  vi.  1-9). 
Following  the  apostle  as  an  "  authority,"  the  state  on 
the  one  hand  and  the  church  o*n  the  other  have  main- 
tained their  separate  "divine  rights  "  to  the  great  injury  of 
both. 

The  ethics  of  the  apostle  finds  its  purest  expression  in 
the  directions  which  he  gives  the  Christians  for  their  rela- 
tions with  one  another  and  with  the  world.     His  morality 


396  THE    TEACHER 

reaches  its  highest  point  in  his  social  ethics.*  Here  the 
ethical  genius  of  his  race  speaks  the  word  of  practical 
righteousness  by  works  in  freedom  from  dogmatic  pre- 
possessions. In  the  social  order  all  are  ''members  one 
of  another,"  should  be  "kindly  affectioned  one  to  another 
with  brotherly  love,  in  honour  preferring  one  another," 
blessing  the  persecutor,  rejoicing  with  them  that  rejoice  and 
weeping  with  them  that  weep,  recompensing  no  man  evil 
for  evil,  providing  things  honest  in  the  sight  of  all  men, 
and  as  much  as  possible  living  at  peace  with  all  (Rom.  xii. 
5-21).  Here  the  welfare  of  all  should  be  preferred  to  the 
gratification  of  the  individual,  who  is  called  upon  to  make 
sacrifices  for  the  common  good,  and  ''love  beareth  all 
things,  believeth  all  things,  hopeth  all  things,  endureth 
all  things"  (i  Cor.  x.  24,  xiii.  7;  Phil.  ii.  4).  He  who  is 
weak  should  be  treated  with  consideration  and  with  the 
sacrifice  of  his  own  liberty  by  him  who  is  strong,  that 
through  the  "knowledge"  of  the  latter  the  former  may  not 
"  perish."  Whoso  "sins  against  the  brethren,  and  wounds 
their  weak  conscience,  sins  against  Christ"  (i  Cor,  viii. 
9,  II,  13).  Love  outranks  faith  and  hope,  subjects  the 
freedom  of  the  individual  to  the  service  of  others,  and  is 
the  fulfilling  of  the  law  (i   Cor.  xiii.    13;  Gal.  v.    13  f.), 

*  "  This  indwelling  Spirit  of  God  is  the  power  not  only  to  break  the  might  of 
the  (j6.pi,  in  the  ego  (Gal.  v.  i6;  Rom.  viii.  i-ii,  13),  and  thereby  to  effect 
the  d7ia(r/Ads  and  the  hriio(jvvf]  of  the  believer  (Rom.  vi.  19,  22),  but  also  to 
call  forth  all  positive  virtues  (Gal.  v.  22).  The  first  and  the  most  essential 
movement  of  the  will  of  the  believer  filled  with  the  irvevixa  is  dydirrj.  As 
the  Spirit  originates  in  faith  (Gal.  v.  5),  as  the  infinite  life-power  which  the 
believer  receives  from  God  in  consequence  of  his  faith,  so  faith  is  bound  up 
with  love,  in  so  far  as  it  is  faith  in  the  love  of  God  and  Christ  (Rom.  v.  5-8; 
Gal.  ii.  20),  and  therefore  itself  becomes  active  in  deeds  of  love  (Gal.  v.  6); 
but  love,  as  faith  become  effective,  is  not  only  the  inward  fulfilling  of  the 
Mosaic  law  (Gal  v.  14;  Rom.  xiii.  10,  cf.  viii.  4),  but  the  believer  also  fulfils 
in  it  rbp  vbfxov  toO  XptcrroO  (Gal.  vi.  2),  and  in  it  lives  positively  a  new  life  for 
God  (Gal.  ii.  19)."  — Holsten,  Die paulin.  Theol.  p.  118. 


ETHICS  397 

while  through  it  faith  comes  to  its  rights  as  a  practical 
power  (Gal.  v.  6).*  Thus  out  of  a  conflict  with  opposing 
dogmatic  points  of  view,  which  threatened  to  overwhelm 
it,  there  emerges  a  social  ethics,  an  ethics  of  righteousness 
by  the  works  of  the  law,  which  not  only  reproduces  the 
highest  achievements  of  the  Hebrew  ethical  genius,  but 
also  represents  the  spirit  and  the  life  of  Jesus.  Although 
it  is  curtailed  at  some  points  by  the  eschatological  point 
of  view,  the  conscientious  student  of  the  apostle  will  not 
fail  to  signalise  the  fact  that  amidst  all  the  intensity  of 
strained  expectation  in  view  of  the  approaching  "end  of 
the  age"  he  did  not  relax  his  vigilance  with  reference  to 
the  moral  welfare  of  the  churches  and  his  zeal  for  the 
purity,  charity,  and  practical  righteousness  of  the  believ- 
ers. Really  if  he  did  think  that  without  their  own  moral 
achievement  and  "merit"  he  could  "present  them  per- 
fect "  at  the  coming  of  the  Lord,  he  appears  sometimes  to 
have  forgotten  this  doctrine,  and  his  contribution  to  prac- 
tical righteousness  despite  the  paradox  of  grace  and  works 
remains  one  of  the  permanent  achievements  of  his  genius. 

*  The  social  ethics  of  Paul  has  interesting  points  of  contact  with  that  of  the 
Stoics.  Despite  the  emphasis  which  the  Stoic  teachers  placed  upon  the  inde- 
pendence of  man  upon  outward  relations,  they  taught  that  his  only  rational 
attitude  was  a  recognition  of  fellowship  with  others  and  a  subordination  of 
the  individual's  interests  and  aims  to  those  of  the  community.  "  In  his  reason 
man  knows  himself  as  a  part  of  the  whole."  "  We  can  treat  rational  beings," 
says  Marcus  Aurelius,  "  only  from  the  point  of  view  of  fellowship  "  (/coij/wi/i/cws)- 
Epictetus  gave  a  religious  expression  to  this  doctrine  when  he  grounded  his 
teaching  of  human  fellowship  upon  the  declaration  that  "  all  are  brothers,  for 
all  have  in  like  manner  God  as  Father."  The  divine  sonship  of  men  which 
Paul  emphasises  is  that  into  which  those  enter  who  accept  Christ  through 
faith.  The  universal  fatherhood  of  God  has  no  distinctive  expression  in  his 
Epistles.  On  the  ethics  of  the  Stoics  see  Zeller,  Die  Philosophie  der  Griechen, 
iii.  I,  pp.  171  ff. 


CHAPTER   XVI 

PREDESTINATION 

THE  traditional  theism  of  Israel  had  in  Paul  a  thor- 
oughly consequent  supporter.  To  him  God  was  the 
supreme  author  and  disposer,  the  first  and  constant  cause. 
He  has  no  ''  counsellor,"  and  no  one  has  first  given  any- 
thing to  Him.  "  Of  Him  and  through  Him  and  to  Him 
are  all  things "  (Rom.  xi.  34-36 ;  i  Cor.  viii.  6).  The 
entire  economy  of  salvation,  and  man  in  his  relation  to 
it,  are  regarded  from  this  point  of  view.  The  condition 
of  human  sinfulness  on  account  of  which  the  atonement 
became  necessary  is  of  divine  appointment.  If  the  multi- 
tude of  men  turn  away  from  the  gospel,  ''  God  hath  con- 
cluded all  in  unbelief"  (Rom.  xi.  32).  If  the  Jews  are 
indifferent  and  blind,  it  is  because  "God  hath  given  them 
the  spirit  of  slumber,  eyes  that  they  should  not  see,  and 
ears  that  they  should  not  hear"  (Rom.  xi.  8).  The  "un- 
cleanness  "  and  'Wile  affections"  of  men  denote  a  degra- 
dation to  which  *'  God  gave  them  up "  (Rom.  i.  24,  26). 
Man  was  created  carnal,  and  as  such  cannot  be  subject 
to  the  law  of  God  (Rom.  viii.  7).  ''  The  law  in  the  mem- 
bers "  brings  him  "  into  captivity  to  the  law  of  sin  and 
death"  (Rom.  vii.  23).  If  the  first  Adam  was  made  a 
mere  living  soul,  a  natural  man,  subject  to  sin  and  death, 
the  second  Adam,  Christ,  was  equally  by  divine  appoint- 
ment made  "a  life-giving  Spirit"  and  an  instrument  in 
the  hand  of  God  to  repair  the  frightful  damage  which  the 
former  had  done.     Only  the  power  of  the  Spirit  can  over- 

398 


PREDES  TINA  TION  3  99 

come  "the  motions  of  sin"  which,  springing  out  of  the 
flesh,  tend  fatally  downward  toward  ruin  and  death.  A 
supernatural  intervention  can  alone  prevent  the  *'  destruc- 
tion "  which  was  supernaturally  determined  in  the  original 
constitution  of  human  nature.  The  historical  drama  of  sin 
and  redemption  was  conceived  in  the  council  of  heaven, 
and  the  celestial  powers  move  the  actors  on  the  stage. 
The  temporary  economy  of  the  law  was  ordained  of  God, 
that  sin  might  abound  (Rom.  v.  20).  He  also  provided 
the  atonement  for  the  abolition  of  the  law  and  the  destruc- 
tion of  sin,  and  the  Spirit  and  the  supernatural  righteous- 
ness under  the  antithetic  dispensation  of  ''grace"  are  His 
''free  gift  "  (Rom.  v.  15-19). 

From  this  point  of  view  the  proofs  adduced  by  the 
apostle  in  Rom.  viii.  18-33  that  the  believers  are  "heirs 
of  God,"  and  as  "joint-heirs  with  Christ"  will  at  the 
Parousia  be  "glorified  together"  with  him  in  the  king- 
dom then  to  be  established,  furnishes  no  surprise  to  the 
attentive  student  of  his  thought.  The  entire  construction 
proceeds  from  the  premises  of  supernaturalism.  The  dis- 
posing hand  of  God  is  evident  in  "the  glory  which  shall 
be  revealed  in  us  "  ;  a  divine  intervention  will  work  the 
miracle  of  the  deliverance  of  "the  whole  creation"  from 
"the  bondage  of  corruption"  and  from  the  "vanity"  to 
which  it  was  subjected  on  account  of  the  sin  of  man  ;  the 
Spirit,  the  heavenly,  supernatural  power,  "  helpeth  the 
infirmities"  of  the  believers,  and  "maketh  intercession" 
for  them  ;  and  by  providential  disposition  "all  things  work 
together  for  good  to  them  who  are  the  called  according 
to  His  purpose."  Finally,  the  teaching  that  the  believers 
will  inherit  the  kingdom  when  Christ  shall  come  is  placed 
beyond  all  question  by  the  declaration  that  this  great  fort- 
une has  been  determined  for  them  in  the  divine  counsel. 
"  For  whom  He  did  foreknow  He  also  did  predestinate  to 


400  THE    TEACHER 

be  conformed  to  the  image  of  His  Son,  that  he  might  be 
the  firstborn  among  many  brethren  "  (Rom.  viii.  29).  The 
direct  divine  determination  is  here  unmistakable.  "  God 
makes  all  things  work  together  for  good  "  (Rom.  viii.  28)  is 
the  correct  interpretation  of  awep^el,  Oeo^  being  implied  as 
the  subject.  The  ''  called  "  are  the  believers,  and  they  are 
believers  according  to  God's  purpose  (irpoOecn^),  that  is, 
because  it  was  His  purpose  that  they  should  be.  To 
make  the  purpose  of  God  dependent  upon  the  act  of 
faith  on  their  part,  that  is,  to  interpret  the  words  to  the 
effect  that  God  had  a  purpose  regarding  them  only 
after  they  became  believers,  is  to  give  a  sense  to  the  pas- 
sage directly  opposite  to  that  intended  by  the  apostle. 
God  did  not  have  a  purpose  with  reference  to  them  be- 
cause they  believed,  but  they  believed  because  He  had 
the  purpose  that  they  should. 

Paul  did  not  think  that  any  one  became  a  believer  in 
Christ  and  an  heir  of  the  glorious  kingdom  unless  it  was 
predetermined  in  the  divine  counsel  that  he  should  be. 
Those  alone  were  "predestinated"  to  this  great  inheri- 
tance whom  God  "foreknew."  The  determination  neces- 
sarily expressed  in  "predestinate"  cannot  be  separated 
from  "foreknew."  The  one  implies  the  other.  To  give 
the  passage  the  sense  that  God  predestinated  to  a  cer- 
tain fortune  those  of  whom  He  foreknew  that  they  would 
of  their  independent  choice  become  believers,  is  to  attri- 
bute to  Paul  a  self-contradictory  determinism  of  which  he 
knew  nothing.*  So  to  interpret  the  words  is  to  wrest 
them  from  their  connection  and  introduce  confusion  into 
the  entire  section.     With  such  a  meaning  in  his  thought 

*  "  It  is  altogether  inadmissible  to  speak  of  a  conditioning  of  the  divine 
election  {iKXoyrj)  by  preaching  regarded  as  calling  and  by  consenting  faith, 
for  these  factors  come  into  consideration  only  as  moments  in  the  realisation 
of  the  unlimited  election."  —  Holtzmann,  Neittcst,  TJieol.  ii.  p.  166. 


PREDES  TIN  A  TION  4O I 

he  could  not  have  written  as  he  did,  but  would  rather  have 
written  :  *' All  things  work  together  for  good  to  them  that 
love  God,  for  these  He  did  predestinate  to  be  conformed 
to  the  image  of  His  Son."  The  passage  cannot  be  ex- 
plained to  this  effect  while  the  omitted  words  are  retained 
without  a  perversion  of  its  manifest  intention.  The  end 
in  view  in  the  divine  predestination  was  the  conformity  of 
the  believers  to  the  image  of  the  Son  of  God.  This  must 
be  interpreted  in  connection  with  the  fortune  of  the  be- 
lievers as  "heirs"  and  with  **the  redemption  of  our  body" 
(Rom.  viii.  17,  23).  In  other  words,  the  passage  has  an 
eschatological  reference,  that  is,  a  reference  to  the  second 
coming  of  Christ.  Then  the  believers  would  be  conformed 
((Tv/jLijL6pcf)ov<;)  to  his  image,  or  would  have  his  "form" 
{/ijLop(f)r))  of  glory  and  splendour  as  he  should  come  forth  from 
the  heavenly  regions  of  light.  "  Flesh  and  blood  cannot 
inherit  the  kingdom  of  God  "  (i  Cor.  xv.  50).  Accordingly, 
"this  corruptible  must  put  on  incorruption,"  and  "those 
who  are  Christ's  at  his  coming  "  will  be  clothed  upon  with 
"spiritual"  or  "celestial"  bodies  (i  Cor.  xv.  40,  53).  The 
"vile  body"  will  be  "changed,"  "that  it  maybe  fashioned 
like  unto  his  glorious  body"  (Phil.  iii.  21)  or  his  body  of 
glory,  the  "spiritual"  form  which  shines  with  celestial 
effulgence  (So^a). 

The  doctrine  of  the  divine  efficacy  in  the  fortune  of  the 
believer  is  further  elaborated  in  Rom.  viii.  30  :  "  Moreover, 
whom  He  did  predestinate,  them  He  also  called  ;  and  whom 
He  called,  them  He  also  justified  ;  and  whom  He  justified, 
them  He  also  glorified."  There  is  only  a  shade  of  dis- 
tinction between  "predestinated"  and  "called."  For  to 
"call "  in  the  Pauline  usage  does  not  mean  simply  to  invite 
to  an  acceptance  of  the  gospel ;  but  the  "  called  "  are  those 
whom  God  has  chosen  or  elected  to  this  divine  fortune, 
and  not  only  chosen,  but  also  led.     The  invitation  is  to 

2D 


402  THE    TEACHER 

all,  and  if  the  "called"  were  conceived  as  simply  the  in- 
vited, they  would  not  be  definitely  discriminated  as  those 
whom  God  predestinated,  and  the  apostle  could  not  have 
written  of  them  as  of  a  fraction  of  Jews  and  gentiles,  as 
he  does  in  Rom.  ix.  24:  ''Even  us  whom  He  hath  called, 
not  of  the  Jews  only,  but  also  of  the  gentiles."  *  Not  only 
is  the  calling  efficacious  in  the  sense  that  God  leads  His 
chosen  ones  into  the  new  life,  but  there  follows  another 
divine  act,  that  of  justification  :  ''Whom  He  called,  them 
He  also  justified,"  that  is,  bestowed  upon  them  "the  right- 
eousness which  is  by  faith."  This  is  throughout  under- 
stood by  Paul  to  be  the  act  of  God,  who  by  virtue  of  His 
supreme  right  declares  those  to  be  righteous  who  accept 
Christ  by  faith.  Accordingly,  they  possess  a  righteousness 
which  is  of  God  instead  of  one  of  their  own  attainment 
"by  works."  The  latter  is  impossible,  while  the  former  is 
bestowed  by  "grace,"  "is  a  free  gift,"  and  in  its  origin  is 
outside  the  connection  of  natural  causation.  Here  it  is  a 
link  in  the  chain  of  supernatural  events  lying  between  the 
"call"  of  the  believers  and  their  inheritance  of  the  king- 
dom. This  inheritance  is  now  spoken  of  as  though  already 
in  the  possession  of  those  who  have  been  predestined  to 
share  in  its  blessedness  (i  Thess.  ii.  12).  Since  it  is 
determined  in  the  divine  counsel,  Paul  writes  of  it  from 
this  point  of  view  as  something  accomplished,  and  sees 
the  believers,  the  elect  of  God,  with  bodies  of  celestial 
splendour  conformed  to  Christ's  "body  of  glory,"  as  they 
meet  their  descending  Lord  to  be  "forever  with  him." 

The  further  development  of  the  doctrine  of  predestina- 
tion shows  the  occasion  of  the  temporary  and  transient 
character   of    certain    of   the   apostle's    teachings.     Rom. 

*  See  I  Cor.  i.  9,  vii.  15,  17;  Gal.  i.  6,  15,  v.  8;  i  Thess.  ii.  12,  iv.  7,  v.  24; 
and  for  the  later  usage  2  Thess.  ii.  14;  2  Tim.  i.  9;  i  Pet.  i.  15,  ii.  9,  v.  10; 
2  Pet.  i.  3. 


PREDES 1  IN  A  TION  40  3 

ix.-xi.  was  written  with  especial  reference  to  tlie  offence 
taken  by  the  Jewish  Christians  at  the  success  of  the  Pauline 
mission  to  the  gentiles  on  the  ground  that  thereby  the 
traditional  right  of  the  Jews  to  preeminence  in  the  Mes- 
sianic kingdom  was  put  in  peril.  After  declaring  his 
''great  heaviness  and  continual  sorrow"  for  his  ''breth- 
ren" and  his  "kinsmen  according  to  the  flesh,"  "to  whom 
pertaineth  the  adoption  and  the  glory  and  the  covenants 
and  the  giving  of  the  law  and  the  service  of  God  and  the 
promises  "  (Rom.  ix.  1-4),  he  proceeds  to  reject  the  Jewish 
apprehension  of  the  divine  promise  on  the  ground  that  the 
latter  did  not  relate  to  the  descendants  of  Israel  according 
to  the  flesh,  but  concerned  only  those  chosen  of  God  by 
His  "purpose  according  to  election"  (verses  6-13).  The 
proofs  of  this  contention  are  drawn  from  various  examples 
in  the  history  of  Israel.  Of  the  two  sons  of  Isaac,  Jacob 
and  Esau,  the  former  was  alone  the  child  "of  the  promise." 
To  the  biblical  text,  "In  Isaac  shall  thy  seed  be  called 
(Gen.  xxi.  12),  he  subjoins  an  explanation  (Midrash)  to  the 
effect  :  "  They  who  are  the  children  of  the  flesh,  these  are 
not  the  children  of  God ;  but  the  children  of  the  promise 
are  counted  [that  is,  elected]  for  the  seed."  The  election 
was  made  prior  to  the  birth  of  the  sons,  and  accordingly 
did  not  depend  at  all  upon  their  personal  qualities  :  "  For 
the  children  being  not  yet  born,  neither  having  done  any 
good  or  evil,  that  the  purpose  of  God  according  to  election 
might  stand,  not  of  works,  but  of  Him  that  calleth."  The 
free  divine  purpose  reverses  the  natural  order,  and  makes 
the  firstborn  the  servant  of  the  younger  (Gen.  xxv.  23);  and 
in  order  to  give  to  this  election  of  God  the  hardest  possible 
expression  the  apostle  applies  to  the  progenitors  personally 
a  passage  of  Scripture  which  relates  to  their  descendants 
(Mai.  i.  2,  3)  :  "  Jacob  have  I  loved,  but  Esau  have  I  hated  " 
(verse  13  ;  cf.  Rom.  ii.  11,  "For  there. is  no  respect  of  per- 
sons with  God  "). 


404  THE    TEACHER 

Apparently  anticipating  an  objection  to  his  argument 
from  the  Jewish  point  of  view,  the  apostle  proceeds  to 
defend  the  election  in  question  on  the  ground  of  the  right 
of  the  supreme  God,  who  is  under  obligations  to  no  one,  to 
act  according  to  His  will.  The  anticipated  objection  evi- 
dently was  that  it  is  unjust  in  God  to  love  one  man  and 
hate  another  before  either  is  born  and  to  elect  the  one  or 
the  other  to  a  certain  fortune  regardless  of  "works."  In 
meeting  it  he  does  not  venture  upon  hazardous  metaphysi- 
cal ground,  but  knowing  that  his  readers  could  not  dispute 
the  Scriptures  he  rests  his  argument  chiefly  upon  examples 
drawn  from  Old  Testament  history  (Rom.  ix.  14-21).  "  What 
shall  we  say  then } "  he  asks,  "  Is  there  unrighteousness 
with  God.?  God  forbid."  It  will  not  surprise  the  student 
of  Paul  who  is  acquainted  with  his  method  of  proving  his 
propositions  from  Scripture  to  find  that  the  words  purport- 
ing to  be  spoken  by  God  to  Moses  in  Ex.  xxxiii.  19  have 
in  the  original  connection  no  relation  to  this  matter  of 
election,  but  are  part  of  the  answer  to  the  lawgiver's  re- 
quest that  Yahweh  show  him  His  glory.  They  relate  to 
this  matter  only,  and  mean  that  Yahweh  is  gracious  to 
Moses  even  though  the  request  in  question  be  not  granted 
according  to  its  intention.  But  Paul  concludes  from  the 
passage  that  ''it  is  not  of  him  that  willeth  nor  of  him  that 
runneth,  but  of  God  that  showeth  mercy."  The  divine 
election  does  not  belong  to  him  who  wills  to  accomplish  a 
certain  thing  or  to  him  who  runs  as  in  a  race,  but  it  is 
purely  a  matter  of  God's  determination.* 

*  "The  movement  of  the  created  world  is  only  the  realisation  of  the  objec- 
tive, transcendent  world-order,  without  the  ability  of  the  freedom  of  man  to 
interfere  in  the  once  determined  course  of  things  [man's  unbelief  cannot 
cause  God's  fidelity  to  His  promise  to  fail,  Rom.  iii.  3].  The  determinations 
of  the  divine  will  with  reference  to  the  course  of  the  world  enter  into  history  in 
great  world-ordering  acts,  and  announce  to  men  the  law  of  the  world-periods 
(ai'tuves),  in  accordance  with  which  they  take  their  course.     In  this  view  of  the 


PREDES  TINA  TION  40  5 

Another  example  of  the  divine  election  is  found  in  Pha- 
raoh, who  in  his  connection  with  the  history  of  Israel  is 
conceived  as  an  instrument  in  the  hands  of  Yahweh.  **  For 
the  Scripture  saith  unto  Pharaoh,"  Paul  writes,  "■  Even  for 
this  same  purpose  have  I  raised  thee  up,  that  I  might  show 
my  power  in  thee,  and  that  my  name  might  be  declared 
throughout  all  the  earth."  The  form  which  the  apos- 
tle gives  to  this  passage  from  Ex.  ix.  16,  illustrates  his 
method  of  quoting  from  the  Old  Testament  by  generally 
following  the  Septuagint  but  correcting  it  according  to 
the  Hebrew  text  when  it  suited  his  purpose  to  do  so.  The 
Septuagint  here  reads  '* preserved"  or  "kept  alive,"  but  he 
renders  from  the  Hebrew  '' raised  thee  up  "  (ef?i7ei/)a)  — 
thus  extending  the  divine  election  back  to  the  origin  of 
the  Egyptian  king  and  rendering  the  example  a  more  in- 
tense expression  of  arbitrary  predestination.  "  That  I 
might  show  "  (otto)?  ivBeL^co/nai)  is  a  distinct  declaration  of 
purpose,  and  relates  to  the  hardening  of  Pharaoh's  heart 
(Ex.  X.  20)  and  his  final  destruction,  and  not  to  the  deliv- 
erance of  the  Israelites  out  of  Egypt.  This  is  evident 
from  the  conclusion  which  Paul  draws  from  the  history  in 
Rom.  ix.  18  :  ''Therefore  hath  He  mercy  on  whom  He  will 
have  mercy,  and  whom  He  will  He  hardeneth."  Nothing 
is  said  or  implied  here  of  God's  penal  justice  or  of  the 
overthrow  of  Pharaoh  as  a  punishment  for  his  opposition 
to  God.  The  one  and  only  doctrine  is  that  the  king  was 
"raised  up,"  and  "hardened,"  for  the  express  purpose  of 
showing  the  divine  "  power."  It  is,  as  we  have  seen,  a 
Pauline  doctrine  that  God  gives  men  up  to  "  uncleanness  " 
and  "  vile  affections  "  on  account  of  their  transgressions 
(Rom.  i.  24,  26).     But  this  teaching  cannot   be  read  into 

world  man's  freedom  has  no  place.  But  since  it  is  again  acknowledged  in  the 
sin  of  Adam,  the  antinomy  between  determination  and  freedom  is  not  recog- 
nised and  resolved."  —  Holsten,  Die  paulin.  Theol.  p.  i6. 


406  THE    TEACHER 

the  connection  in  question  ;  and  since  Paul  did  not  con- 
cern himself  with  the  reconciliation  of  the  two  proposi- 
tions, his  expositors  may  well  let  them  stand  as  he  has  left 
them.  The  attempt  to  unite  them  here  can  only  result  in 
the  confusion  of  the  apostle's  thought  and  the  overthrow 
of  his  argument.* 

To  the  very  natural  objection  that  if  the  hardening  of 
certain  persons  is  God's  own  act,  He  cannot  justly  call 
them  to  account  for  their  conduct,  the  apostle  replies  that 
the  Creator  has  a  right  to  do  what  He  will  with  His  creat- 
ures. The  anticipated  objection  is  put  in  the  form  of 
questions  :  '*  Why  doth  He  yet  find  fault  t  For  who  hath 
resisted  His  will }  "  That  is,  what  right  has  God,  then,  to 
censure  the  man  whom  He  has  "hardened,"  since  it  is  im- 
possible to  resist  His  will  t  Paul  at  first  rules  the  question 
out.  *' Nay  but,  O  man,"  he  asks,  "  who  art  thou  that  re- 
pliest  against  God.?  Shall  the  thing  formed  say  to  him 
that  formed  it.  Why  hast  thou  made  me  thus  t "  Then 
refusing  entirely  to  apply  an  ethical  standard  to  God's 
dealings  with  men,  he  rests  his  argument  upon  the  affirma- 
tion of  the  divine  *'  power,"  as  if  might  made  right :  *'  Hath 
not  the  potter  power  over  the  clay,  of  the  same  lump  to 
make  one  vessel  unto  honour  and  another  unto  dishonour  .?  " 
This  reminds  us  of  Isa.  xlv.  9:  "Shall  the  clay  say  to  him 
that  fashioned  it,  what  makest  thou  }  "  See  also  Isa.  xxix. 
16,  Ixiv.  8;  Jer.  xviii.  6;  Wisdom  xv.    '].\     The  argument 

*  "As  a  matter  of  course  Paul  does  not  attempt  to  resolve  the  antinomy 
which  lies  in  the  conception  of  freedom;  he  does  not  at  all  regard  it"  (von 
Soden,  Zeitschr.  filr  Theol.  ti.  Kirche,  1 892,  p.  119).  With  respect  to  Bey- 
schlag's  attempt  to  escape  the  doctrine  of  predestination  on  the  ground  of 
Rom.  ii.  4,  5,  Holtzmann  remarks  that  just  as  well  could  one  avoid  the  doctrine 
of  freedom  by  appealing  to  Rom.  ix.  11,  18. 

t  Pfleiderer  is  of  the  opinion  that  in  writing  the  section  Rom.  ix.  19-23 
there  evidently  hovered  before  the  apostle's  mind  two  passages  from  the  Book 
of  Wisdom,  xii.  18-22  and  xv.  7.  Paul's  probable  acquaintance  with  this  book 
has  already  been  mentioned  (Chapter  I). 


PREDESTINATION  407 

evidently  is  that  man  has  just  as  little  right  to  question 
God  for  making  some  men  morally  vessels  of  dishonour  and 
others  vessels  of  honour  as  a  pot  of  clay  has  to  question 
the  potter  for  making  it  comely  or  uncomely.  God  has  the 
power,  and  that  is  the  end  of  the  matter.  Paul  shuns  the 
metaphysical  question,  the  one  really  at  issue,  and  one  in 
fact  raised  by  himself,  whether,  when  God  has  by  election 
"hardened"  a  man.  He  can  justly  hold  him  responsible. 
In  avoiding  this  problem  he  refuses  to  know  anything  of  a 
divine  ethical  standard  which  may  be  imposed  upon  men 
because  it  is  God's.  In  this  position  he  is  as  little  in  ac- 
cord with  Jesus'  teaching  that  his  disciples  should  be  per- 
fect as  their  heavenly  Father  is  perfect,  as  he  is  with  his 
own  doctrine  that  the  Spirit  furnishes  the  rule  of  life  for 
those  who  possess  it. 

In  the  further  development  of  his  argument  the  apostle 
proceeds  to  an  application  of  the  doctrine  in  question  to 
the  election  of  some  Jews  and  the  call  of  the  gentiles  (Rom. 
ix.  22-29).  ''What  if  God,  willing  to  show  His  wrath," 
he  says,  *'and  to  make  His  power  known,  endured  with 
much  long-suffering  the  vessels  of  wrath  fitted  to  destruc- 
tion." This  conditional  clause  is  followed  by  no  conclu- 
sion, but  the  sentence  was  evidently  completed  in  his 
mind  by  some  such  question  as,  Will  you  thus  reply  against 
God  1  The  meaning  is  that  since  God,  despite  the  fact 
that  He  temporarily  endured  with  much  long-suffering 
the  vessels  of  wrath,  will  make  His  power  known,  and 
ultimately  accomplish  His  wrath  upon  those  whom  He 
has  made  to  be  its  objects,  there  is  no  ground  for  mak- 
ing a  charge  against  Him.  The  endurance  with  much 
long-suffering  does  not  change  His  purpose  with  refer- 
ence to  those  whom  He  has  ''fitted  for  destruction." 
"  Willing  ((9eXa)z^)  to  show  His  wrath  "  means  simply  "al- 
though He  will  show  it,"  and  its  execution  is  only  postponed 


408  THE    TEACHER 

(see  '*  the  forbearance  of  God,"  Rom.  iii.  25).  The  ques- 
tion here  again  recurs  which  Paul  avoided  in  the  preceding 
discussion  :  Wliy  should  God  entertain  ''  wrath  "  against 
those  whom  He  has  Himself  ''fitted  for  destruction"? 
The  potter  who  has  made  a  vessel  ''  unto  dishonour  "  has  no 
ground  for  being  angry  at  the  vessel  because  it  is  uncomely. 
To  deny  the  divine  agency  in  the  fitness  for  destruction 
and  soften  the  words  into  "ripe  for  destruction"  is  to  do 
violence  to  the  sense  which  the  words  must  have  according 
to  the  connection  of  thought,  in  which  the  potter  and  the 
clay  must  not  be  left  out  of  account,  and  in  which  KaTrirtcr- 
fieva  ek  op^rjv  is  set  over  against  a  TrporjTOifjLaaev  ek  86^av, 
"  which  he  had  before  prepared  unto  glory."  The  "vessels 
of  mercy "  whom  God  elected  beforehand  to  enjoy  the 
"glory  "  of  the  Messianic  kingdom  are  designated  in  verse 
24  as  "us,"  that  is,  the  Christian  believers  "not  of  the 
Jews  only,  but  also  of  the  gentiles."  On  these  God 
will  "make  known  the  riches  of  His  glory,"  while  upon  the 
others  He  will  show  His  "wrath  "  and  His  "  power."  The 
passages  quoted  from  Hosea  i.  10  and  Isa.  x.  22  f.  in  sup- 
port of  the  argument  are  interpreted  by  the  apostle  with- 
out regard  to  their  original  connection  in  which  they  have 
no  such  meaning  as  he  here  gives  them. 

The  exclusion  of  the  Jews  is  next  regarded  from  the 
point  of  view  of  their  own  defective  striving  after  right- 
eousness, since  they  sought  that  which  is  "  of  works  "  and 
not  the  only  true  righteousness  by  faith  which  the  gentiles 
have  attained  (Rom.  ix.  30-32).  The  question  naturally 
arises.  If  the  fault  be  their  own,  and  their  exclusion  is  due 
to  their  ignorance  or  perversity,  how  is  this  solution  recon- 
cilable with  the  doctrine  of  the  preceding  verses  in  which 
their  rejection  is  declared  to  be  by  divine  decree.^  The 
answer  is  that  the  apostle  here  considers  the  matter  accord- 
ing to  the  course  of  events  in  connection   with  secondary 


PREDESTINATION  409 

causation  by  human  actions.  That  he  did  not,  however, 
think  of  abandoning  his  doctrine  that  the  end  was  divinely 
determined  is  evident  frOm  the  recurrence  of  *'  the  election 
of  grace  "  and  from  the  express  declaration  that  the  failure 
in  question  is  to  be  attributed  to  the  fact  that  "  God  gave 
them  the  spirit  of  slumber,  eyes  that  they  should  not  see 
and  ears  that  they  should  not  hear  (Rom.  xi.  5,  7,  8).  In 
this  chapter  he  proceeds  to  show  that  *'  God  hath  not  cast 
away  His  people  whom  He  foreknew,"  because  ''there  is 
at  this  present  time  a  remnant  according  to  the  election 
of  grace "  (verses  2,  4).  "  Israel  [as  a  whole]  hath  not 
obtained  that  which  he  seeketh  for,  but  the  election  hath 
obtained  it,  and  the  rest  were  blinded." 

This  hardening  and  blinding  of  Israel  are,  however,  only 
temporary,  and  are  conceived  as  a  part  of  the  divine  plan 
of  salvation  with  reference  to  Jews  and  gentiles.  "  I  say 
then,"  continues  the  apostle,  "  have  they  stumbled  that 
they  should  fall.?"  That  is,  that  they  should  eventually 
fail  of  attaining  the  Messianic  kingdom.  "God  forbid." 
Rather  he  declares  that  through  their  fall  or  unbelief 
salvation  is  come  to  the  gentiles,  by  whose  example  they 
will  be  provoked  to  rivalry,  and  at  length  be  received  as 
those  alive  from  the  dead  (Rom.  xi.  11-33)-  The  divine 
procedure  was  to  break  off  some  of  the  "branches"  "be- 
cause of  unbelief"  and  to  graft  in  the  gentiles  from  "the 
wild  olive-tree."  The  gentiles  are  admonished  to  take 
heed  lest  they  be  not  spared,  as  God  did  not  spare  the 
natural  branches.  As  to  the  Jews,  "God  is  able  to  graft 
them  in  again."  It  is  manifest  from  the  terms  employed 
that  not  only  is  the  entire  process  included  in  the  divine 
purpose,  but  the  several  steps  in  its  unfolding  and  real- 
isation are  effected  by  the  direct  action  of  God,  while 
at  the  same  time  personal  censure  is  implied,  and  warn- 
ino-  is  given   on    the    general    presumption    of    individual 


4IO  THE    TEACHER 

responsibility.  There  is,  accordingly,  no  reconciliation 
of  divine  sovereignty  and  free  agency,  and  nothing  was 
further  from  the  apostle's  purpose  than  to  attempt  a 
solution  of  the  problem.  The  former  is  over  and  over 
again  expressly  asserted  in  terms  that  admit  of  no  mis- 
understanding, in  terms  that  are  sharp,  inflexible,  and 
harsh  ;  the  latter  is  clearly  implied.  The  expositor  must 
leave  the  problem  as  it  stands.  His  task  is  not  that  of  the 
philosopher,  and  he  will  contribute  nothing  to  the  expound- 
ing of  the  apostle's  thought  by  presuming  to  be  wiser 
than  he  was  in  the  attempt  to  reconcile  that  which  he 
has  left  unreconciled.* 

Finally,  the  pessimistic  mood  out  of  which  chapter  ix. 
was  written  is  overcome,  and  the  note  of  optimism  is 
struck  in  the  declaration  that  when  ''  the  fulness  of  the 
gentiles  is  come  in,"  *'all  Israel  shall  be  saved"  (Rom.  xi. 
25,  26).  This  conclusion  the  apostle  seeks  to  establish  by 
a  quotation  from  Isa.  lix.  20,  xxvii.  9,  which  is  given  freely 
after  the  Septuagint.  This  Greek  translation  does  not, 
however,    correctly   render   the  sense  of  the   original,   in 

*  Godet  attempts  a  reconciliation  on  the  theory  of  God's  foreknowledge  of 
man's  free  choices:  "As  a  general  having  a  full  knowledge  of  the  opposing 
commander's  plan  of  campaign  would  form  his  own  according  to  this  certain 
foresight,  and  bring  it  about  that  all  the  movements  and  counter-movements 
of  his  enemy  must  result  in  the  success  of  his  own  plans,  so  God,  after  estab- 
lishing the  end,  employs  free  human  actions,  M'hich  He  beholds  out  of  His 
eternity,  as  factors  to  which  He  assigns  a  role,  and  out  of  which  He  forms  so 
many  means  for  the  realisation  of  His  eternal  plan."  On  this  Holtzmann  re- 
marks that  irpoyivuiO'KeLv  in  connection  with  irpbOeais  (Rom.  viii.  28,  ix.  11) 
can  by  no  means  signify  mere  foreknowledge,  and  that,  by  Thv  Xabv  avrov 
irpoiyvw  (Rom.  xi.  2)  the  free  choice  of  Israel  as  a  people  of  God's  own  can 
certainly  alone  be  meant,  but  not  the  foreknowledge  of  an  historical  fact.  He 
adds  that  Godet  does  well  not  to  set  up  his  solution  of  the  difficulty  reached  by 
changing  predestination  into  prescience,  as  a  result  of  exegesis  {A^etitest.  TheoL 
ii.  p.  174).  Exegesis  can  reach  only  one  conclusion.  All  attempts  at  a 
philosophical  resolving  of  the  problem  lie  outside  the  sphere  of  biblical  theol- 
ogy and  in  the  realm  of  indeterminate  speculative  controversy. 


PRE  DBS  TINA  TION  4 1 1 

which  the  apostle's  thought  is  not  at  all  contained.  The 
'*  Deliverer"  who  was  to  come  is  Christ  in  his  second  appear- 
ance (the  Parousia).  Then  the  salvation  of  Israel  will  be 
consummated  by  the  reception  of  all  the  Jews  then  living 
into  the  kingdom,  their  "ungodliness  "  having  been  *'  turned 
away."  Here  as  elsewhere  in  the  apostle's  eschatology  no 
account  is  taken  of  the  unconverted  Jews  or  gentiles  who 
have  died,  or  may  die  before  that  event.  The  boldness  of 
his  optimism  becomes  apparent  when  the  meagre  results 
of  his  mission  down  to  the  time  of  the  writing  of  this 
Epistle  and  the  attitude  of  the  Jews  toward  it  are  con- 
sidered, and  when,  furthermore,  the  brief  time  that  re- 
mained before  the  expected  "day  of  the  Lord  "  is  taken 
into  account.  This  difificulty  disappears,  however,  in  view 
of  the  hypothesis  of  the  divine  ordering  and  intervention 
which  underlies  the  construction  of  the  entire  section. 


CHAPTER    XVII 

THE  CHURCH   AND  THE   SACRAMENTS 

IT  accords  with  the  simple,  natural,  and  unconstrained 
organisation  of  the  little  Pauline  religious  communities, 
which  we  have  seen  in  Chapter  V,  that  the  apostle  formu- 
lated no  distinctive  doctrine  of  the  Church.  It  accords 
also  with  what  we  have  found  to  be  a  prominent  phase  of 
his  thought  in  the  discussion  of  his  teachings  concerning 
the  Spirit,  Justification,  and  Ethics  that  his  mysticism 
should  here  play  an  important  part.  In  the  same  manner, 
then,  as  other  words  borrowed  from  the  Greek  received 
in  his  use  of  them  a  new  significance,  so  the  word  for 
church,  eKKX-qaia,  denotes  not  simply  an  assembly,  but  a 
collection  of  persons  who  are  one  and  all  in  possession  of 
the  divine  Spirit,  to  whom  it  is  a  bond  of  union  and  fellow- 
ship, and  signifies  their  common  participation  in  Christ, 
whose  *'body"  they  constitute.  "As  the  body  is  one," 
he  writes  to  the  Corinthians,  "  and  hath  many  members, 
and  all  the  members  of  that  one  body  being  many  are 
one  body,  so  also  is  Christ";  and  the  application  of  this 
analogy  is,  "  Ye  are  the  body  of  Christ,  and  members  in 
particular,"  that  is,  each  one  in  his  part.  All  the  churches 
of  Christ  are  conceived  as  composing  his  "  body,"  and  each 
particular  organisation  is  a  part  of  the  totality.*     Accord- 

*  "  This  church  of  God  is  a  church  of  the  Spirit  of  God.  The  unity  and 
selfhood  of  the  Spirit  it  is  which  removes  all  distinctions  of  the  external,  fleshly, 
national,  political,  and  sexual  (Gal.  iii.  28),  and  combines  the  plurality  of  the 
members  of  the  church  into  a  unity  (i  Cor.  xii.  13).     But  the  Spirit  of  God 

412 


THE    CHURCH  AND    THE   SACRAMENTS  413 

ingly,  while  iK/cXriaia  is  employed  to  designate  single 
churches  (i  Thess.  i.  1  ;  i  Cor.  i.  2),  it  is  also  used  for 
the  Church  as  a  whole  that  includes  the  separate  com- 
munities (Gal.  i.  13;  Phil.  iii.  6;  i  Cor.  x.  32,  xv.  9), 
which,  however,  were  not  united  in  a  general  organisation. 
To  Paul  the  Church  is  not  simply  an  association  of 
individuals  united  by  a  common  purpose  to  promote  their 
spiritual  culture  by  means  of  reciprocal  encouragement 
and  help.  Rather  the  supernaturalism  which  dominated 
all  his  religious  thinking  plays  here  a  distinctive  and 
prominent  part.  The  Church  is  only  temporarily  and 
provisionally  connected  with  the  world  and  with  time  or 
with  the  ''present  age"  {aloov  ovto<;).  To  its  members 
belongs  the  "inheritance"  of  the  kingdom  of  God  soon 
to  appear,  to  which  they  are  elected,  and  for  which  they 
are  ''glorified"  (Rom.  viii.  17,  30).  Accordingly,  the 
powers  of  "the  age  to  come,"  the  Messianic  age,  are 
already  at  work  in  it.  The  members  belong  together 
not  only  by  virtue  of  their  common  glorious  destiny,  but 
also  because  they  have  a  "fellowship"  which  is  not  of 
this  world — the  "fellowship  of  the  Spirit."  If  there  are 
"diversities  of  gifts,"  "the  same  Spirit"  works  in  all 
(i  Cor.  xii.  4).  The  church  in  Corinth  is  called  "the 
temple  of  God,"  and  is  told  that  "the  Spirit  of  God 
dwells"  in  it  (i   Cor.  iii.  16,  17).     The  divine  wisdom  is 

individualises  in  this  community  the  fulness  of  its  divine  contents  in  com- 
municating to  every  single  person  his  own  gifts,  the  x^P-^^t^^'^^  '''^^  irvev- 
(xaros  (i  Cor.  xii.  4  ff.;  Rom.  xii.  4ff.).  In  this  way  the  church  becomes  a 
unity  of  one  body  with  separate  members,  a  form  with  coordinate  parts,  in 
which  the  divine  Spirit  works  through  gifts  bestowed  upon  the  individuals. 
Thus  the  church  is  a  body  of  the  Spirit,  each  individual  being  a  member  of 
the  Spirit,  and  since  Christ  and  the  Spirit  are  identical,  the  church  is  a  body 
of  Christ  (i  Cor.  vi.  15,  xii.  27),  that  is,  Christ  and  the  Spirit  have  in  the 
church  of  God  the  reality  of  an  effective  life  already  existing  in  this  world." 
—  Holsten,  Die  paulin.  Theol.  p.  121. 


414  THE    TEACHER 

their  true  illumination,  and  "if  any  man  seemeth  to  be 
wise  in  this  world,  let  him  become  a  fool."  The  fellow- 
ship {Koivwvid)  into  which  God  has  "called"  the  believers 
is  that  of  His  "Son,  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord"  (i  Cor.  i.  9), 
and  its  consummation  will  be  effected  at  his  coming  in 
"his  kingdom  and  glory"  (i  Thess.  ii.  12).  It  was  alto- 
gether foreign  to  the  mystic  and  apocalyptic  thought  of 
the  apostle  to  conceive  of  the  Church  as  an  ethical-religious 
association  which  was  not  destined  as  a  whole  by  virtue  of 
the  powers  dwelling  and  working  in  it  to  participate  in 
the  glory  that  was  soon  to  be  revealed.*  The  "fellowship 
of  the  Holy  Spirit  "  (2  Cor.  xiii.  14;  Phil.  ii.  i)  was  to  him 
the  "pledge"  of  its  resurrection-estate.  Accordingly  he 
could  not  theoretically  recognise  the  ultimate  separation 
of  even  the  worst  member  of  the  Church  from  its  common 
fortune  in  "the  day  of  the  Lord,"  for  which  "the  spirit" 
of  the  man  whom  he  delivered  over  to  Satan  "for  the 
destruction  of  his  flesh"  must  be  "saved"  (i  Cor.  v.  5). 
The  "body  of  Christ,"  of  which  they  are  all  "members" 
by  reason  of  possessing  his  "  life-giving  Spirit,"  will  be 
complete  on  that  day  of  his  triumph,  no  part  being  cast 
off  among  those  who  are  "perishing"  (i  Thess.  iv.  I3).t 

Baptism  is  regarded  by  the  apostle  from  the  same 
mystico-supernatural  point  of  view.  The  classic  passage 
on  the  subject  is  Rom.  vi.  3-8,  where  he  says  that  bap- 
tism "into  Christ-,"  that  is,  into  faith  in  him  as  the  Mes- 
siah, is  baptism  "into  his  death,"  or  into  a  recognition  of 
his  death  as  an  atonement  for  sin  and  a  means  of  redemp- 

*  The  ethical  point  of  view  is  not,  however,  disregarded.  "The  church  is 
rather  the  ground  upon  which  the  virtues  most  highly  appreciated  by  Paul, 
those  of  reciprocal  subordination  and  sacrifice,  come  to  a  full  unfolding." 
—  Holtzmann,  A^eutest.  Theol.  ii.  p.  175. 

t  It  is  evident  that  the  idea  of  Christ  as  the  "  Head  "  of  the  Church  (Eph. 
and  Col.)  does  not  belong  to  the  genuine  and  original  Pauline  conception,  and 
cannot  be  combined  with  it  without  confusing  the  apostle's  entire  construction 
of  the  matter. 


THE    CHURCH  AND    THE   SACRAMENTS  415 

tion.  The  believers,  he  goes  on  to  say,  are  buried  with 
Christ  by  baptism  into  death.  The  being  buried  in  the 
water  symbolises  what  is  actually  conceived  to  take  place, 
that  is,  the  appropriation  by  the  subject  of  the  death  of 
Christ,  so  that,  as  Christ  died  to  sin,  he  dies  to  it,  his 
''old  man  is  crucified,"  ''that  the  body  of  sin  might  be 
destroyed."  "He  that  is  dead  is  justified  [freed]  from 
sin."  Christ  in  his  death  paid  the  penalty  of  sin,  and  as 
many  as  in  baptism  die  with  him  are  by  the  appropriation 
to  themselves  of  his  death  set  free  from  it,  and  rise  to 
"newness  of  life."  The  rite  is  accordingly  not  regarded 
by  Paul  as  simply  symbolical  of  the  beginning  of  an  ethical- 
religious  process  in  which  the  subject  is  conceived  as  at- 
taining righteousness  by  his  own  endeavour  or  by  "works." 
Symbolical  it  is,  but  more  than  this.  For  to  Paul  Christ 
was  not  simply  an  ethical  teacher  and  example  into  whose 
name  merely  men  were  baptized  as  a  symbol  of  their  pur- 
pose to  imitate  him  and  follow  him  in  obedience.  But 
the  death  and  resurrection  are  to  him  the  central  ideas 
on  which  the  entire  significance  of  the  mission  of  Jesus 
turned.  Hence,  believers  are  baptized  into  Jiis  dcatJi, 
"planted  together  in  the  likeness  of  his  death  "  {avjK^vToi), 
grow  together  with  him  mystically,  become  of  one  nature 
with  him  in  his  dying,  so  that  they  die  ideally  to  sin  as  he 
did  actually.  All  that  he  won  by  his  atonement  thus  be- 
comes theirs.  With  him  they  have  died  to  sin  and  to  the 
law,  and  when  they  are  raised  out  of  the  water  this  act 
symbolises  their  participation  in  the  new  life  of  the  resur- 
rection which  will  be  consummated  in  them  at  the  Parousia. 
Death  has  no  more  power  over  them  than  it  has  over 
Christ.  Having  died  with  him  they  "will  also  live  with 
him  "  in  the  kingdom  of  God.* 

*  "  In  the  whole  asseml)lage  of  the  Pauline  thoughts  there  is  no  element  so 
remote  from  and  so  foreign  to  the  preaching  of  Jesus,  which  was  rooted  in  the 


4l6  THE    TEACHER 

The  more  than  symboUcal  significance  of  baptism  to 
Paul  is  apparent  from  the  words  in  i  Cor.  xii.  13,  where  in 
connection  with  the  doctrine  that  the  believers  mystically 
constitute  the  body  of  Christ  he  says  :  *'  For  by  one  Spirit 
are  we  all  baptized  into  one  body,  whether  we  be  Jews  or 
gentiles,  whether  we  be  bond  or  free,  and  have  been  all 
made  to  drink  one  Spirit."  The  rite  is  accordingly  con- 
ceived as  a  baptism  by  the  Spirit,  an  endowment  with  this 
supernatural  power  which  is  ''given  "  to  the  believer  (Rom. 
v.  5),  and  which  "bears  witness"  with  his  spirit  that  he 
is  a  child  of  God  (Rom.  viii.  16).  In  this  mystic  dying 
with  Christ  the  subject  of  baptism  is  "freed  from  sin," 
and  in  being  "washed"  by  means  of  the  sacred  rite  he  is 
"sanctified"  and  "justified  in  the  name  of  the  Lord  Jesus 
and  by  the  Spirit  of  our  God"  (i  Cor.  vi.  11).  This  doc- 
trine is  the  logical  outcome  of  the  apostle's  conception  of 
the  flesh,  whose  power  he  believed  could  not  be  overcome 
by  a  process  of  the  natural  development  of  ethical-religious 
forces  from  within.  Only  the  divine  Spirit  could  dominate 
this  fateful  agency  of  "destruction."  Only  "the  last 
Adam "  could  counteract  the  ruinous  tendencies  which 
proceeded  from  "  the  first  Adam,"  and  this  he  could  do  be- 
cause he  was  "  a  life-giving  Spirit  "  ;  hence  the  entire  econ- 
omy of  salvation  and  of  the  Church  and  its  sacraments  is 
conceived  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  interference  of  a 
supernatural  power.  Another  expression  of  the  idea  of 
the    fellowship   with    Christ    into   which    the    subject    of 

ground  of  Israel,  as  just  this  doctrine  of  baptism.  This  lies  wholly  on  the 
Hellenistic  side  of  the  apostle's  teaching,  and  is  most  intimately  connected 
with  the  metaphysical  dualism  of  flesh  and  Spirit.  The  iron  compulsion  of 
sin  ruling  as  a  power  of  nature  can  be  broken  only  by  a  higher  nature-power; 
the  translation  out  of  the  sphere  of  the  physical  existence  devoted  to  death, 
into  the  opposite  sphere  of  the  resurrection  and  life,  requires  the  idea  of  a 
corresponding  mysterious  act,  which  represents  and  depicts  as  well  as  mediates 
and  effects  the  inward  catastrophe,"  —  Holtzmann,  Neutest.  Theol.  ii.  p.  179. 


THE    CHURCH  AND    THE   SACRAMENTS  417 

baptism  comes  is  given  in  Gal.  iii.  27,  where  the  apostle 
says :  "  For  as  many  of  you  as  have  been  baptized  into 
Christ  have  put  on  Christ."  This  is  what  the  writer  of 
Colossians  calls  the  putting  on  of  the  new  man  (Col. 
iii.  10).  The  *' old  man"  is  put  off,  "crucified"  in  this 
mystic  dying  with  Christ  in  baptism.  The  flesh  is  done 
away,  ''the  body  of  sin"  is  slain,  and  in  their  place  is  "a 
new  creation  "  which  must  not  be  rationalised  into  a  new^ 
growth,  since  God  alone  is  conceived  as  effecting  the 
"creation."  Beneath  the  act  of  baptism,  then,  Paul  saw 
the  mysterious  process  of  the  believer's  transfer  into  a 
living  fellowship  with  Christ,  in  which  he  became  a  par- 
ticipant in  all  that  had  been  achieved  on  the  cross  and  at 
the  sepulchre,  in  which  he  was  delivered  from  the  bondage 
of  the  law,  passed  into  the  life  of  the  Spirit,  and  became  an 
heir  of  the  glory  which  "  the  day  of  the  Lord  "  would 
reveal.* 

Paul's  account  of  Jesus'  last  supper  with  his  disciples 
which  he  says  he  had  "  received  of  the  Lord,"  doubtless 
by  tradition  (i  Cor.  xi.  23-27),  contains  striking  deviations 
from  the  report  of  the  event  in  the  oldest  Gospels.  Only 
in  the  third  Gospel,  whose  author  probably  followed  Paul's 
version,  do  we  find  the  direction,  "This  do  in  remembrance 
of  me,"  and  here  are  wanting  the  Pauline  words  :  "  This  do 
ye  as  often  as  ye  drink  it  in  remembrance  of  me."    The 

*  Paul  neither  approves  nor  disapproves  the  baptism  "  for  the  dead " 
(i  Cor.  XV.  29).  But  it  is  significant  that  this  rite  was  performed  in  a  church 
founded  upon  his  teaching.  The  custom  doubtless  was  that  a  believer 
whose  friends  or  relations  had  died  without  baptism  was  baptized  for  them  or 
in  their  behalf —  a  ceremony  which  must  have  been  regarded  as  equivalent  to 
baptism  in  their  stead.  That  this  was  assumed  to  secure  their  resurrection  is 
evident  from  the  words :  *'  What  shall  they  do  who  are  baptized  for  the  dead, 
if  the  dead  rise  not  at  all  ?  "  They  can  only  discontinue  the  rite  as  useless. 
If  baptism  was  believed  in  a  Pauline  church  to  effect  the  resurrection  and  sal- 
vation at  the  Parousia  of  the  unbaptized  dead,  the  importance  which  Paul 
attached  to  the  rite  is  evident. 
2E 


41 8  THE    TEACHER 

words  :  "  For  as  often  as  ye  eat  this  bread  and  drink 
this  cup  ye  do  show  the  Lord's  death  till  he  come,"  are 
a  commentary  of  the  apostle's  on  the  account  that  he 
had  received.  The  original,  ''  This  is  my  body,"  becomes 
in  his  rendering:  ''This  is  my  body  for  you"  (literally, 
"  the  for  you  "  ),  to  which  the  third  evangelist  adds  ''  given," 
and  "the  blood  of  the  covenant"  becomes  "the  blood  of 
the  new  covenant."  That  the  tradition  underwent  modifi- 
cations at  his  hands  can  hardly  be  doubted.  The  first  two 
Gospels  do  not  intimate  the  establishment  of  a  sacramental 
observance  by  Jesus  which  is  implied  in  the  words  :  "  This 
do  in  remembrance  of  me."  The  form  which  the  apostle 
gives  to  the  account  denotes  the  importance  which  he 
attached  to  the  rite.  To  him  it  had  a  profound  mystical 
and  sacramental  significance  in  connection  with  his  idea  of 
fellowship  with  Christ  which  we  have  seen  to  be  the  cen- 
tral thought  in  his  teaching  as  to  the  church  and  baptism. 
This  is  evident  in  the  commentary,  "  Ye  do  show  the  Lord's 
death  till  he  come,"  that  is,  till  the  Parousia  at  the  end  of 
the  age.  This  leaves  on  one  side  the  thought  of  him  as 
an  example,  and  goes  to  that  conception  of  his  mission 
which  was  central  in  the  apostle's  Christology.  In  his 
death  lay  the  believers'  hope  "until  he  come  "  of  the  glory 
and  blessedness  which  his  coming  would  bring.  They  had 
"died  with  him,"  had  entered  into  the  fellowship  of  his 
death,  and  it  became  them  to  keep  this  precious  fellowship 
sacramentally  in  mind  "  until  he  come,"  when  they  hoped 
also  to  be  "raised"  and  "glorified  with  him." 

The  sacrament  was  thus  a  means  of  grace,  since  it  served 
to  bind  the  believers  more  closely  in  that  fellowship  with 
the  death  of  Christ  which  was  the  ground  of  their  salvation. 
If  in  the  apostle's  assurance  of  the  salvation  of  all  who  had 
once  "  put  on  Christ "  which,  as  we  have  seen,  was  sometimes 
shaken,  he  did  not  regard  this  observance  as  a  necessity. 


THE    CHURCH  AND    THE   SACRAMENTS  419 

he  certainly  thought  it  to  be  eminently  fitting.  They  who 
owed  all  to  this  fellowship  might  well  keep  it  in  mind, 
and  show  forth  the  great  event  on  which  it  rested,  until 
the  Lord  should  come.  The  religious  mysticism  which 
Paul  has  inserted  into  the  simple  account  in  the  oldest 
Gospels  of  Jesus'  last  supper  with  his  disciples  is  apparent 
in  his  incidental  reference  to  '' the  Lord's  table"  in  his 
admonition  to  the  Corinthians  respecting  idolatry  (i  Cor. 
X.  16-21).  The  heathen  who  in  their  sacrifices  ''partake 
of  the  table  of  devils,"  as  well  as  the  Jews  who  eat  the 
sacrifices  of  the  old  covenant,  and  are  "partakers  of  the 
altar,"  come  into  a  mystic  ''fellowship  "  {kolvcovlo)  with  the 
demons  or  the  Divinity  whom  the  altars  represent.  He 
would  not,  he  tells  the  Corinthians,  that  they  "  should 
have  fellowship  with  devils,"  and  declares  that  it  is  impos- 
sible that  they  should  enter  into  the  twofold  communion 
implied  in  partaking  of  "the  Lord's  table  "  and  "the  table 
of  devils."  The  one  /coLvcovta  excludes  the  other.  Neither 
is  conceived  by  him  as  a  mere  symbol.  There  is  an  actual 
mysterious  "fellowship  "  in  which  the  "  partaker"  is  bound 
with  the  spiritual  personality  assumed  to  stand  behind  the 
outward  ceremony.  Accordingly,  he  says  :  "  The  cup  of 
blessing  which  we  bless,  is  it  not  the  communion  of  the 
blood  of  Christ  ?  The  bread  which  we  break,  is  it  not 
the  communion  of  the  body  of  Christ  ?  "  The  rite  is  con- 
ceived as  representing  not  only  "  the  Lord's  death,"  but 
also  the  mystic  fellowship  of  the  believers  with  it,  their 
partaking  in  it,  which  we  have  seen  to  be  set  forth  in  Rom. 
vi.  3-8.  Thereby  they  are  not  only  one  with  Christ  in  his 
death  but  are  united  in  a  sacred  fellowship  with  one  another, 
so  that  "  being  many  "  they  "  are  one  bread  and  one  body  "  ; 
"for  we  are  all  partakers  of  that  one  bread."  The  ap- 
propriation of  the  physical  elements  is  not  conceived  as 
that  of  the  body  and  blood  of  Christ  actually  present,  but 


420  THE    TEACHER 

just  as  the  Jewish  sacrificers  became  "  partakers  "  (kolvcovol) 
of  the  altar,  or  came  into  communion  with  God  whom 
the  altar  represented,  so  the  Christians  in  eating  and 
drinking  from  "  the  Lord's  table  "  symbolised  their  mys- 
tic fellowship  with  the  death  of  Christ  who  was  the  living 
Spirit  of  the  "  body  "  which  they  constituted,  the  Church. 
The  more  than  symbolical  significance  which  the  par- 
taking of  the  sacramental  bread  and  wine  had  for  the 
apostle  is  apparent  in  what  he  writes  to  the  Corinthians 
regarding  the  eating  and  drinking  *' unworthily  "  (i  Cor. 
xi.  27-32).  After  reminding  them  that  in  observing  the 
sacramental  rite  they  "  show  the  Lord's  death  until  he 
come,"  he  proceeds  to  say:  *' Wherefore,  whosoever  shall 
eat  this  bread,  and  drink  this  cup  of  the  Lord  unwor- 
thily shall  be  guilty  of  the  body  and  blood  of  the  Lord." 
The  riotous  and  gluttonous  way  in  which  the  Corinthians 
observed  the  communion  of  the  Lord's  table  was  an  offence 
against  the  sacred  ''body  and  blood "  of  Christ,  because 
wanting  in  a  due  reverence  for  the  symbols.  The  serious- 
ness of  the  offence  is  denoted  in  the  threatened  penalty  : 
''  For  he  that  eateth  and  drinketh  unworthily,  eateth  and 
drinketh  damnation  to  himself,  not  discerning  the  Lord's 
body."  The  participant  in  the  sacrament  should  "examine 
himself,"  lest  he  incur  a  judgment  for  failing  to  discrimi- 
nate between  the  elements  on  the  table  of  the  Lord  and 
ordinary  food.  The  judgment  which  ''many"  had  drawn 
upon  themselves  for  eating  and  drinking  "  unworthily " 
was  sickness  and  in  some  cases  death  :  "  For  this  cause 
many  are  weak  and  sickly  among  you,  and  some  sleep 
[are  fallen  asleep]  "  (i  Cor.  xi.  30).  In  Paul's  usage 
"sleep"  signifies  the  condition  of  the  dead  in  the  grave 
or  the  underworld  during  the  time  intervening  between  the 
dissolution  of  the  body  and  the  resurrection  (i  Thess.  iv. 
13  ;  I  Cor.  XV.  6,  20).     The  result  of  this  judgment  is  indi- 


THE    CHURCH  AND    THE   SACRAMENTS  42 1 

cated  in  the  words:  ''But  when  we  are  judged  we  are 
chastened  of  the  Lord  ;  that  we  should  not  be  condemned 
with  the  world  "  (i  Cor.  xi.  32).  The  judgment  of  those 
who  had  been  supernaturally  stricken  with  sickness  or 
death  was,  as  in  the  case  of  the  incestuous  person,  to  save 
them  in  ''  the  day  of  the  Lord  "  from  the  condemnation  to 
'*  destruction  "  which  would  overtake  the  unbelievers  or 
*'the  world,"  that  is,  those  who  from  not  having  believed 
in  Christ  belonged  to  the  present  age  (alcov),  while  the 
Christians  although  living  in  ''the  present  age"  were 
really  citizens  of  "  the  age  to  come,"  —  the  age  of  the 
Messiah  and  the  kingdom  of  God  of  which  they  were 
"  heirs."  The  apostle  appears  to  have  regarded  a  severe 
affliction  of  the  flesh  of  a  believer  who  had  committed  an 
offence,  an  affliction  amounting  to  its  "destruction"  in 
the  case  of  the  incestuous  person  and  of  those  eating  and 
drinking  unworthily  who  had  been  punished  with  death, 
as  conducive  to  the  "saving"  of  the  "spirit  "  of  the  sub- 
ject "in  the  day  of  the  Lord."  If  this  view  is  correct,  we 
do  not  need  to  consider  the  difficulty  raised  by  Schmiedel 
as  to  reform  in  the  underworld  which  is  hardly  a  Pauline 
doctrine.  The  chastening  may,  however,  refer  not  to  those 
who  had  suffered  the  judgment  of  death,  but  to  the  living 
believers. 

The  importance  attached  by  Paul  to  the  sacraments 
suggests  the  inquiry  whether  he  regarded  them  as  essential 
to  salvation  in  the  Messianic  kingdom  and  as  assuring  it. 
The  student  of  the  apostle  soon  learns  that  his  empJiasis 
must  be  taken  with  qualifications.  We  must  regard  this 
fact  when  we  find  him  writing  of  baptism  as  if  it  were  an 
essential  factor  in  the  believer's  ideal  dying  with  Christ 
and  in  his  resurrection  at  the  Parousia :  "  Now  if  we  be 
dead  with  Christ  [through  baptism],  we  believe  that  we 
shall  also  live  with  him  "  (Rom.  vi.  8,  cf.  vv.  4-6).     Yet 


422  THE    TEACHER 

essential  as  the  rite  here  appears  to  be  regarded,  it  is 
evident  that  salvation  is  not  elsewhere  represented  as 
dependent  upon  it.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  grounded  upon 
the  atoning  death  of  Christ  and  upon  the  faith  of  the 
individual  through  v^hich  alone  justification  is  accorded. 
The  resurrection  is  assured  by  the  possession  of  the  Spirit 
(Rom.  viii.  ii),  and  the  sonship  of  God  from  v^hich  this 
boon  is  inseparable  (Rom.  viii.  4)  is  bestowed  on  account 
of  faith  in  Jesus  Christ  (Gal.  iii.  26).  The  baptism  into 
the  death  of  Christ  in  the  following  verse  denotes  only 
another  side  of  the  one  mystic  process.  The  qualification 
with  which  the  apostle's  emphasis  must  be  taken  is 
apparent  when  we  consider  that  the  putting-on  of  Christ, 
which  in  Gal.  iii.  27  occurs  through  baptism,  is  represented 
in  Rom.  xiii.  14  as  an  ethical  achievement,  and  that  even 
faith  is  subordinate  to  love  in  i  Cor.  xiii.  13.  The 
student  cannot  but  feel  that  here,  as  often,  there  is  "a 
certain  unrest  and  confusion  in  the  apostle's  views  in 
contrast  with  the  crystal  simplicity  and  greatness  of 
Jesus."  If  the  emphasis  upon  the  sacraments  favours  the 
Roman  Catholic  conception  of  the  church,  that  upon  the 
individual's  independent  relation  to  salvation  overthrows 
the  principle. 


CHAPTER    XVIII 

ESCHATOLOGY  * 

THE  prominence  of  the  eschatological  interest  in  the 
early  church  is  not  easily  appreciated  by  the  Chris- 
tian intelligence  of  the  present  time.  We  have  come  to 
regard  Christianity  chiefly  in  its  practical  aspect  as  a  prin- 
ciple to  be  applied  in  the  formation  of  character,  in  right 
living,  and  in  the  solution  of  social  problems.  Its  relation 
to  destiny  concerns  us  principally  as  a  matter  quite  remote 
from  the  present  time,  affecting  our  individual  fortunes 
and  those  of  the  race  in  a  manner  altogether  vague  and 
indeterminate.  The  question  of  a  final  consummation  in 
which  the  earthly  course  of  Christianity  shall  culminate  in 
a  great  judicial  crisis  is  looked  upon  more  and  more  as  a 
matter  of  speculation,  and  is  pushed  aside  in  the  intense 
occupation  with  the  problems  of  life.  We  are  so  much 
occupied  with  the  development  of  Christian  truth  in  the 
institutions  of  civilisation  that  we  have  little  room  for  an 
interest  in  the  end  of  the  world.  With  the  primitive 
Christians,  however,  the  reverse  was  the  case.  They  re- 
garded themselves  as  having  come  upon  ''  the  last  times," 
and  their  eager  interest  in  the  impending  *'end  of  the 
age  "  reduced  to  a  minimum  their  concern  with  the  present 
life,  except  so  far  as  it  was  conceived  to  be  related  to  the 
new  order  about  to  be  introduced.  It  is  due  to  the  Jewish 
origin  of  Christianity  that  this  conception  arose  and  pre- 
vailed   during   the    earliest    period    of   its    history.      The 

*  The  Neiv  World,  June,  1895,  ^^'^^^  revision  and  additions. 
423 


424  THE    TEACHER 

proclamation  of  the  kingdom  of  God  could  not  easily  be 
dissociated  in  the  Jewish  mind,  familiar  with  the  current 
apocalypses  of  the  nation,  from  a  catastrophic  termination 
of  the  existing  world-order,  and  the  introduction  of  a  new 
and  happier  course  of  affairs  under  the  expected  ruler, 
whose  advent  was  longed  for  as  the  fulfilment  of  prophecy. 
It  was  because  the  Founder  of  Christianity  was  believed 
by  his  followers  to  have  been  this  expected  head  of  the 
kingdom  of  God,  the  Messiah,  that  such  hopes  were  con- 
nected with  his  person.  Since  their  Messianic  expectations 
were  not  fulfilled  in  his  mission,  which  ended  externally 
in  ignominy  and  failure,  their  belief  in  his  Messiahship 
could  be  saved  only  by  the  hope  in  his  future  coming  in 
power  and  glory,  death  not  having  held  him  in  the 
underworld,  to  assume  the  dignity  of  the  Christ,  the 
Anointed  of  God. 

It  is  natural  that  this  hope  in  the  great  Messianic  ad- 
vent should  be  expressed  in  the  manner  of  the  current 
thought  concerning  the  coming  of  the  national  Deliverer, 
that  is,  that  it  should  be  conveyed  in  the  form  and  with 
the  colouring  of  apocalypse.  Accordingly,  we  find  in  the 
Gospels  mention  of  a  '' renovation,  when  the  Son  of  Man 
shall  sit  on  the  throne  of  his  glory,"  and  of  a  coming  of  the 
Son  of  Man  in  the  clouds  of  heaven  with  power  and  great 
splendour,  who  will  send  his  angels  with  a  sound  of  a  trum- 
pet to  gather  his  elect  from  the  four  winds  (Matt.  xix.  28, 
xxiv.  30,  31).  Whatever  Jesus  may  have  said  regarding  the 
future,  these  words  and  others  of  similar  import  are  doubt- 
less the  expression  which  the  primitive  Christians  gave  to 
their  eschatological  hopes.  Their  intense  and  absorbing 
interest  in  ''  the  end  of  the  age  "  presupposes  their  belief 
in  its  nearness  ;  and  we  find  accordingly  that  they  ex- 
pected to  live  to  see  their  Lord  returning  with  the  clouds 
of  heaven.     Their  generation  would  not  pass  before  this 


ESCHATOLOGY  425 

great  consummation  should  be  effected,  and  the  twelve 
apostles  would  sit  upon  twelve  thrones  as  judges  of  the 
tribes  of  Israel.  Words  of  an  eschatological  import  are 
put  into  the  mouth  of  John  the  Baptist  when  he  is  made  to 
declare  of  the  one  who  was  to  come  that  **  his  fan  is  in  his 
hand,  and  he  will  thoroughly  cleanse  his  threshing-floor ; 
and  he  will  gather  his  wheat  into  the  garner,  but  the  chaff 
he  will  burn  up  with  unquenchable  fire"  (Matt.  iii.  12). 
The  proclamation  that  ''the  kingdom  of  God  is  at  hand" 
could  have  no  other  meaning  to  those  to  whom  it  was 
originally  made.  ''The  wrath  to  come  "  could  signify  to 
them  only  the  terrible  judgment  of  the  end  of  the  age. 
Whether  the  apostolic  preaching  took  up  the  refrain  of  the 
words  ascribed  to  John  the  Baptist  and  Jesus,  or  whether 
the  record  of  the  latter  is  coloured  by  the  predominant  tone 
of  the  former,  certain  it  is  that  the  message  of  the  earliest 
Christian  teachers  was  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah,  or  the 
one  who  was  to  come  for  the  establishment  of  the  kingdom 
of  God. 

The  burden  of  this  preaching  doubtless  finds  expression 
in  the  question  which  the  disciples  are  represented  in  the 
Acts  as  asking  Jesus  after  the  resurrection  :  "  Lord,  dost 
thou  at  this  time  restore  the  kingdom  to  Israel } "  But 
when  he  was  immediately  "taken  up,"  it  is  not  strange 
that,  as  they  "were  looking  steadfastly  into  heaven,"  the 
hope  should  have  been  born  in  their  breasts  which  denoted 
the  Jewish-Christian  form  of  the  Messianic  expectation, 
and  which  is  conveyed  in  the  words  of  the  "  two  men  in 
white  apparel"  who  stood  by:  "Ye  men  of  Galilee,  why 
stand  ye  looking  into  heaven }  This  Jesus  who  was  re- 
ceived up  from  you  into  heaven  shall  so  come  in  like  man- 
ner as  ye  have  beheld  him  going  into  heaven  "  (Acts  i.  6, 
11).  In  the  preaching  of  Peter  recorded  in  the  Acts  it  is 
noteworthy  that  the  apostle  urges  repentance  on  eschato- 


426  THE    TEACHER 

logical  grounds,  that  is,  in  order  that  preparation  may  be 
made  for  the  great  event  which  was  to  mark  the  end  of  the 
age  :  ''  Repent  ye  therefore,  and  turn  again,  that  your  sins 
may  be  blotted  out,  that  so  there  may  come  seasons  of 
refreshing  from  the  presence  of  the  Lord  ;  and  that  He 
may  send  the  Christ  who  hath  been  appointed  for  you, 
even  Jesus,  whom  the  heavens  must  receive  until  the  time 
of  the  restoration  of  all  things,  whereof  God  spoke  by  the 
mouth  of  His  holy  prophets  since  the  world  began  "  (Acts 
iii.  19,  20).  Of  the  same  purport  are  the  words  ascribed  to 
Paul  at  Athens  :  **But  now  He  commandeth  men  that  they 
should  all  everywhere  repent ;  inasmuch  as  He  hath  ap- 
pointed a  day  in  which  He  will  judge  the  world  in  right- 
eousness by  the  man  whom  He  hath  ordained  "  (Acts  xvii. 

30,  30- 

The  prominence  of  the  eschatological  interest  in  the 
thought  of  Paul  would  be  evident  from  these  words  if  their 
genuineness  were  established.  But  it  does  not  depend 
upon  the  decision  of  the  question  whether  he  spoke  as  he 
is  reported  in  the  Acts.  As  a  Jew  who  accepted  the  risen 
Jesus  as  the  Messiah  his  entire  conception  of  the  relation 
of  the  old  to  the  new  order  of  things,  of  the  present  to  the 
future,  must  have  undergone  a  radical  transformation  of 
which  there  is  no  evidence,  if  he  did  not  connect  with  the 
Messiahship  the  expectation  of  a  Messianic  kingdom  of 
some  sort  presently  to  come  in  power  and  glory.  One 
great  transformation  was,  however,  effected  in  his  thought, 
for  he  did  not  conceive  the  coming  kingdom  to  be  a  politi- 
cal or  a  national  Jewish  one,  but  rather  a  spiritual  dominion 
which  should  include  all  Jews  and  gentiles  who  prior  to 
Jesus'  coming  had  accepted  him  as  their  Lord.  How  much 
the  future  occupied  his  thought,  and  how  precious  it  was  to 
him  both  on  his  own  account  and  for  the  sake  of  his  be- 
loved spiritual  children,  the  believers  in  Jesus,  is  evident 


ESC  HA  TOLOGY  427 

from  the  frequent  references  to  it  in  which  his  writings 
abound.  While  it  cannot  be  denied  that  he  attached  great 
ethical  and  spiritual  importance  to  his  own  and  their  belief 
in  the  risen  Lord,  and  that  he  cherished  "a  deep  religious 
interest,  which  with  fear  and  trembling  strove  for  his  own 
righteousness  before  God,  and  contended  for  the  victory  of 
the  divine  will  in  the  world,"  it  must  be  admitted  that  the 
moral-spiritual  motive  was  not  the  sole  and  perhaps  not 
the  dominant  one  in  his  thought,  but  tliat  he  was  intensely 
concerned  about  the  outcome,  the  reward,  of  faith  to  him- 
self and  his  fellow-believers,  which  the  future  would  make 
known. 

Whatever  rewards  Christian  experience  may  afford  in 
this  present  life,  Paul  conceived  that  it  is  only  in  the  life  to 
come  that  the  believer's  real  happiness  and  compensations 
will  be  revealed.  Accordingly,  he  writes  to  the  Corinthi- 
ans :  "  If  in  this  life  only  we  have  hoped  in  Christ,  we  are 
of  all  men  most  pitiable"  (i  Cor.  xv.  19).  The  connection 
in  which  the  passage  stands  determines  this  to  be  its  mean- 
ing, despite  the  attempts  to  connect  *'only"  {[xovov)  with 
"  hoped  "  or  with  "  in  Christ."  The  presence  of  the  words, 
''in  this  life,"  and  their  emphatic  position  in  the  sentence 
are  inexplicable  if  this  interpretation  is  incorrect.  The 
argument  is  directed  against  those  who  deny  the  resurrec- 
tion, and  is  to  the  effect  that  if  the  dead  rise  not,  then 
Christ  was  not  raised,  and  if  he  perished,  then  those  who 
have  fallen  asleep  in  him  hoping  that  God,  who  raised  him 
as  the  first  fruits  of  them  that  slept,  would,  because  of 
their  union  with  him  through  faith,  raise  them  also,  are 
likewise  perished  ;  so  that,  if  we  have  hope  in  this  life  only 
and  not  also  in  the  resurrection  to  eternal  life,  our  condi 
tion  is  most  pitiable. 

The  eudemonistic   point  of  view,  reward  in   the  life  to 
come   for   trials  endured    in   the   present  life,  is    plainly 


428  THE    TEACHER 

expressed  in  the  words :  ''  If  after  the  manner  of  men  I 
fought  with  beasts  at  Ephesus,  what  doth  it  profit  me  ? 
If  the  dead  are  not  raised,  let  us  eat  and  drink,  for  to- 
morrow we  die"  (i  Cor.  xv.  32).  Sacrifices  and  conflicts, 
"jeopardy  every  hour,"  for  the  cause  of  the  Lord  Jesus  are 
warranted  only  if  those  who  endure  such  stress  have  a 
hope  of  the  coming  glory  which  is  assured  by  the  resurrec- 
tion of  the  dead,  when,  clothed  with  ''incorruption  "(verse 
42),  they  shall  meet  the  descending  Christ.  If  this  hope 
is  vain,  then  rather  than  "die  daily"  they  will  do  well  to 
live  a  life  of  sensuous  pleasure,  for  to-morrow  they  will  go 
down  into  the  gloomy  underworld  without  return  to  light. 
How  Paul  must  have  presented  the  gospel  to  the  Thessa- 
lonians,  and  what  the  central  idea  of  the  "  faith  "  was  with 
which  he  inspired  them,  may  be  seen  from  these  words  in 
the  first  Epistle  addressed  to  them  :  "  In  every  place  your 
faith  toward  God  is  gone  forth  .  .  .  and  how  ye  turned 
unto  God  from  idols  to  serve  a  living  and  true  God  and  to 
wait  for  His  Son  from  heaven,  whom  He  raised  from  the 
dead,  even  Jesus,  who  delivereth  us  from  the  wrath  to 
come"  (i.  8,  9).  We  have  here  the  two  cardinal  ideas  of 
primitive  Christianity  —  the  belief  in  God,  to  which  Jews 
did  not  need  to  be  converted,  but  which  must  be  preached 
to  the  gentiles,  and  faith  in  Jesus  as  the  Messiah  who  was 
to  come  from  heaven,  and  through  whom  alone  was  deliver- 
ance from  the  "wrath"  of  the  impending  last  days. 

The  eschatological  idea  predominates  also  in  Paul's  long- 
ing to  see  again  the  beloved  of  Thessalonica,  "for,"  he 
asks,  "what  is  our  hope,  or  joy,  or  crown  of  glorying.** 
Are  not  even  ye,  before  our  Lord  Jesus  at  his  coming } " 
(ii.  19).  His  cherishing  of  them  is  not  independent  of  a 
certain  degree  of  **joy"  and  "glorying"  in  them,  since 
their  fidelity  would  enhance  his  honour  when  he  should 
present  them  before  the  Lord  at  the  Parousia.     The  refrain, 


.      ESCHATOLOGY  429 

whose  leading  note  is  the  thought  of  the  last  things,  occurs 
again  when  he  expresses  the  wish  that  their  love  may 
abound,  *'to  the  end  that  He  may  establish  your  hearts 
unblamable  in  holiness  before  our  God  and  Father  at  the 
coming  of  our  Lord  Jesus  with  all  his  saints  "  (iii.  13);  and 
again  when,  at  the  conclusion  of  the  Epistle,  he  expresses 
his  fervent  benediction :  "  And  the  God  of  peace  himself 
sanctify  you  wholly ;  and  may  your  spirit  and  soul  and 
body  be  preserved  entire,  without  blame  at  the  coming  of 
our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  "  (v.  23).  In  like  manner,  at  the 
opening  of  the  first  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians,  he  thanks 
God  for  the  grace  which  was  given  to  his  brethren  in 
Corinth  in  Christ  Jesus,  "that  in  everything  ye  were 
enriched  in  him,  in  all  utterance  and  all  knowledge ;  even 
as  the  testimony  of  Christ  was  confirmed  in  you,  so  that 
ye  come  behind  in  no  gift,  waiting  for  the  revelation  of 
6ur  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  who  shall  confirm  you  unto  the  end, 
that  ye  be  unreprovable  in  the  day  of  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ "  (i.  5-9). 

Confidence  and  repose  in  the  divine  strength  for  the 
trials  of  the  present  life  do  not  satisfy  the  apostle's 
religious  needs,  but  his  hope  looks  forward  to  the  end,  and 
his  trust  is  "in  God  who  raiseth  the  dead."  In  other 
words,  his  hope  is  eschatological,  and  he  finds  courage  and 
strength  in  the  present  distress  only  in  the  assurance  of 
the  blessed  deliverance  which  the  "end"  will  bring  when, 
having  put  off  the  "earthly  house,"  he  shall  enter  into 
that  "building  from  God,  a  house  not  made  with  hands, 
eternal  in  the  heavens."  Whatever  righteousness  may  be 
worth  "for  its  own  sake,"  or  whatever  earthly  compensa- 
tions it  may  secure,  he  looks  forward  with  eager  longing 
to  the  assured  glory  that  is  to  come :  "  For  verily  in  this 
we  groan,  longing  to  be  clothed  upon  with  our  habitation 
which  is  from  heaven.   .  .  .     For  indeed  we  that  are  in  this 


430  THE    TEACHER 

tabernacle  do  groan,  being  burdened  ;  not  that  we  would 
be  unclothed,  but  that  we  would  be  clothed  upon,  that 
what  is  mortal  may  be  swallowed  up  of  life.  Now  He  that 
wrought  us  for  this  very  thing  is  God,  who  gave  unto  us 
the  earnest  of  the  Spirit.  .  .  .  We  are  of  good  courage, 
and  are  willing  rather  to  be  absent  from  the  body,  and  to 
be  at  home  with  the  Lord.  Wherefore  also  we  make  it 
our  aim,  whether  at  home  or  absent,  to  be  well  pleasing 
unto  him.  For  we  must  all  be  made  manifest  before  the 
judgment-seat  of  Christ,  that  each  one  may  receive  the 
things  done  in  the  body,  according  to  what  he  hath  done, 
whether  it  be  good  or  bad"  (2  Cor.  v.  i-io).  The  object 
of  all  ethical  and  spiritual  striving  is  the  realisation  of  the 
hope  that  at  the  coming  of  Christ,  or,  if  not  surviving  that 
event,  then  at  death,  the  believer  may  be  clothed  upon 
with  the  glorious  ''spiritual  body."  His  "aim"  is  to  be 
well  pleasing  to  Christ,  in  order  that,  when  he  shall  appear 
before  his  judgment-seat,  he  may  be  found  worthy  of  the 
blessed  eschatological  reward,  "  the  habitation  which  is 
from  heaven." 

It  is  evident,  accordingly,  that  the  gospel  of  Paul  can- 
not be  comprehended  by  one  who  interprets  it  out  of  the 
"Christian  consciousness"  of  the  present  age.  The  lights 
and  shadows  of  the  impending  consummation  are  so 
mingled  in  it  that  it  can  be  understood  only  by  the 
historical  sense  that  discerns  it  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  time  in  which  it  originated  and  of  the  race  through 
which  it  took  its  form.  Whatever  was  to  be  hoped  for  or 
feared,  whatever  fearful  looking  for  of  judgment  or  eager 
longing  for  reward  there  was,  the  end  would  reveal ;  and 
the  end  was  so  near  that  all  that  was  hidden  in  the  terrible 
antitheses  of  death  and  life,  destruction  and  salvation, 
would  speedily  be  manifested.  If  they  who  had  "the 
earnest  of  the  Spirit"  might  look  forward  with  high  hope 


ESCHATOLOGY  43 1 

to  the  glory  with  which  they  should  be  crowned,  others 
might  well  tremble  at  their  impending  fate.  The  hard 
and  impenitent  heart  only  treasured  up  "  wrath  in  the  day 
of  wrath  and  revelation  of  the  righteous  judgment  of  God, 
who  will  render  to  every  man  according  to  his  works  ;  to 
them  who  by  patience  in  well  doing  seek  for  glory  and 
honour  and  incorruption,  eternal  life ;  but  unto  them  that 
are  factious,  and  obey  not  the  truth,  shall  be  wrath  and 
indignation,  tribulation  and  anguish,  upon  every  soul  of 
man  that  doeth  evil,  of  the  Jew  first  and  also  of  the  Greek. 
.  .  .  For  as  many  as  have  sinned  without  law  shall  perish 
without  law,  and  as  many  as  have  sinned  under  the  law 
shall  be  judged  by  the  law"  (Rom.  ii.  5-13).  Accordingly, 
the  great  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  with  its  accom- 
panying *'  peace  with  God  "  is  not  left  to  stand  by  itself, 
but  only  finds  its  completion  in  the  apostle's  thought  when 
it  is  supplemented  by  the  eschatological  expectation. 
Hence  he  writes  to  the  Romans:  ''Being  therefore  justi- 
fied by  faith,  let  us  have  peace  with  God  through  our  Lord 
Jesus  Christ  .  .  .  and  let  us  rejoice  in  hope  of  the  glory 
of  God"  (verses  i,  2).  The  "glory"  of  their  transfigura- 
tion in  the  kingdom  of  God,  which  was  to  be  inaugurated 
at  the  Parousia,  is  the  consummation  in  which  those  who 
had  been  justified  by  faith  "rejoice  in  hope,"  and  is  the 
end  on  account  of  which  their  justification  is  the  occasion 
of  such  rejoicing. 

The  great  consummation  was  to  be  effected  by  the  per- 
sonal coming  of  the  ascended  Christ  out  of  the  heavens. 
In  this  aspect  of  the  eschatological  doctrine  Paul  was  in 
accord  both  with  the  apocalyptic  conceptions  of  the  later 
Jewish  theology,  on  which  he  was  in  no  small  degree 
dependent  for  several  of  his  dogmatic  opinions,  and  with 
the  views  of  the  original  apostles.  For  it  was  the  apoca- 
lyptic doctrine  that  the  Messiah  was  "  concealed  "  in  the 


432  THE    TEACHER 

heavens  prior  to  his  manifestation  ;  and  since  from  the 
primitive-apostolic  point  of  view  he  had  already  appeared, 
died,  been  raised,  and  ascended,  "  the  heavens  must  receive 
him  until  the  time  of  the  restoration  of  all  things  "  accord- 
ing to  the  preaching  of  Peter  in  the  Acts.  The  coming 
is  explicitly  set  forth  in  i  Thess.  iv.  i6  as  follows : 
"  For  the  Lord  himself  shall  descend  from  heaven  with  a 
shout,  with  the  voice  of  the  archangel,  and  with  the  trump 
of  God,  and  the  dead  in  Christ  shall  rise  first ;  then  we 
that  are  alive,  that  are  left,  shall  together  with  them  be 
caught  up  in  the  clouds  to  meet  the  Lord  in  the  air ;  and 
so  shall  we  be  forever  with  the  Lord."  Equally  specific 
is  the  declaration  in  Phil.  iii.  20,  21:  ''For  our  citizen- 
ship is  in  heaven,  from  whence  also  we  wait  for  a  Saviour, 
the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  who  shall  fashion  anew  the  body  of 
our  humiliation,  that  it  may  be  conformed  to  the  body  of 
his  glory." 

The  terms  employed  in  both  these  passages  leave  no 
doubt  that  the  event  in  question,  the  "  Parousia,"  the 
"revelation,"  the  "day  of  the  Lord,"  was  not  only  believed 
to  be  a  personal  manifestation  of  Christ,  a  reappearance, 
but  that  it  was  also  expected  soon  to  occur.  The  apostle 
himself  hoped  to  live  to  see  it,  since  he  includes  himself 
without  doubt  in  the  "  we  "  who  were  to  be  "alive  "  at  the 
time.  He  gives  no  detailed  representation  of  the  woes, 
tribulations,  and  travail-pains  which  according  to  one  form 
of  the  Messianic  expectations  of  the  time  were  to  precede 
the  manifestation  of  the  Messiah,  and  which  find  a  definite 
expression  in  the  synoptic  picture  of  the  second  advent 
(Matt.  xxiv.  6-9,  29-31,  and  parallels).  He  does  not  dis- 
claim a  knowledge  of  the  precise  time  of  the  Parousia,  but 
writes  to  the  Thessalonians  that  "there  is  no  need"  that 
he  should  inform  them  on  this  point,  for  they  "know  full 
well  that  the  day  of  the  Lord  cometh  as  a  thief  in  the 


ESCHATOLOGY  433 

night"  (i  Thess.  v.  i,  2).  The  day  was  to  come  suddenly 
and  unexpectedly  upon  the  unbelievers,  and  when  they  are 
saying  ''peace  and  safety,"  ''sudden  destruction  cometh 
upon  them,  as  travail  upon  a  woman  with  child,  and  they 
shall  not  escape"  (verse  3),  but  of  the  believers  he  says  : 
"But  ye,  brethren,  are  not  in  darkness,  that  the  day  should 
overtake  you  as  a  thief ;  for  ye  are  all  sons  of  the  light 
and  sons  of  the  day"  (verses  4,  5).  To  the  Romans  he 
declares  that  "the  night,"  the  present  darkened  age,  "is 
far  spent,  and  the  day  is  at  hand,"  and  that  "  salvation," 
deliverance  from  "death"  or  extinction  as  the  wao:es  of 
sin,  and  entrance  upon  the  "life"  of  the  coming  kingdom 
of  God,  "is  nearer  to  us  than  when  we  first  believed  "  (xiii. 
II,  12).  The  declaration  to  the  Corinthians  that  the  be- 
lievers, including  himself,  were  they  "  upon  whom  the  ends 
of  the  ages  are  come,"  corresponds  with  the  admonition 
in  an  earlier  chapter  that  since  "the  time  is  shortened," 
all  temporal  relations  and  affairs,  such  as  marriage  and 
business,  should  be  regarded  as  of  transient  significance 
and  as  unworthy  of  serious  attention,  "for  the  fashion  of 
this  world  passeth  away."  It  is  only  on  the  supposition 
that  the  apostle  took  a  very  hopeful  view  of  the  progress 
of  evangelisation  that  we  can  reconcile  his  expectation  of 
the  coming  of  "the  day  of  the  Lord  "  during  his  own  life- 
time with  the  belief  that  at  that  time  the  mass  of  gentiles 
and  Jews  would  be  converted,  that  "the  fulness  of  the 
gentiles"  would  have  come  in  and  "all  Israel"  be  saved 
(Rom.  xi.  25,  26). 

Although  the  coming  of  Christ  at  the  Parousia  is  con- 
ceived as  the  descent  of  a  spiritual  being  with  a  luminous 
"body  of  glory  "  accompanied  by  angels,*  it  appears  to  be 

*  It  is  a  disputed    question  whether  the  "  saints  "  (ayioi)  in  the  passage 
(i  Thess.  iii.  13)  should  be  understood  as  designating  angels.     Paul  nowhere 
else  uses  this  word  for  angels,  yet  such  a  use  of  it  appears  in  the  Septuagint, 
2F 


434  ^^^    TEACHER 

represented  as  visible  to  eyes  of  flesh,  in  accordance  with 
the  synoptic  apocalyptic,  in  which  it  is  declared  that  men 
"shall  see  the  Son  of  Man  coming  on  the  clouds  with 
power  and  great  glory"  (Matt.  xxiv.  30).  Other  phenom- 
ena apprehensible  to  the  physical  senses  are  also  indicated, 
for  it  is  said  that  the  coming  of  the  Lord  will  be  accom- 
panied by  a  shout  (eV  KeXevaixari),  a  word  which  is  explained 
by  the  terms,  ''the  voice  of  the  archangel  "  and  "the  trump 
of  God"  (i  Thess.  iv.  16).  The  KeXeva/ia  here  mentioned 
—  a  word  not  elsewhere  used  in  the  New  Testament  — 
is  probably  identical  with  "the  last  trump"  in  i  Cor. 
XV.  52,  although  in  the  latter  passage  a  series  of  trumpet 
calls  appears  to  be  implied,  the  "last"  of  which  is  the 
signal  for  the  resurrection  of  the  believers.  Not  in  the 
train  of  the  descending  Christ  are  "  those  who  are  fallen 
asleep  in  Jesus,"  but  God  will  bring  them  with  Jesus  at 
his  coming,  that  is,  the  Christian  believers  who  had  died 
prior  to  the  Parousia  will  come  forth  out  of  the  underworld 
and  be  united  with  the  descending  Lord.  They  will  rise 
out  of  hades  with  incorruptible  spiritual  bodies,  luminous 
bodies  of  "glory,"  like  the  heavenly  body  of  Christ;  and 
those  that  are  living  at  this  time,  that  is,  the  living  believers, 
will  undergo  a  transformation  of  their  corruptible  bodies 
into  bodies  of  incorruption  and  glory  (i  Thess.  iv.  13-17; 
I  Cor.  XV.  51-54;   Phil.  iii.  21). 

That  there  is  a  radical  difference  between  the  body  of 
flesh  and  that  which  at  the  Parousia  would  enter  into  the 
kingdom  of  Christ,  between  the  natural  and  the  spiritual, 
the  terrestrial  and  the  celestial  bodies,  is  a  doctrine  of  the 
Pauline  eschatology  which  has  an  unmistakable  expression. 

and  it  was  a  current  belief  that  angels  were  to  accompany  Christ  at  the  Parou- 
sia. If  angels  are  not  meant,  then  Paul  must  have  had  in  mind  the  holy 
men  who  according  to  the  Jewish  belief  had  passed  out  of  this  life  into  heaven 
instead  of  descending  through  death  to  the  underworld. 


ESCHATOLOGY  435 

It  is  a  fundamental  tenet  that  "flesh  and  blood  cannot 
inherit  the  kingdom  of  God"  (i  Cor.  xv.  35-51).  Hence 
the  believer's  body,  which  was  buried  at  death,  was  not  to 
appear  at  the  resurrection  when  Christ  should  come,  and 
the  fleshly  bodies  of  the  Christians  living  at  that  time  are 
not  regarded  as  fitted  without  change  for  the  new  condi- 
tions. If  the  apostle  had  any  theory  of  the  relation  of 
the  two  kinds  of  bodies  to  each  other  and  of  the  prin- 
ciple according  to  which  the  natural  body  was  transformed 
into  the  spiritual,  whether  in  the  case  of  those  who,  hav- 
ing died,  were  to  be  raised,  or  of  those  who  should  be 
"  changed "  without  death,  he  has  not  given  it  an  alto- 
gether clear  and  unmistakable  exposition.  The  penalty 
of  sin,  death,  regarded  not  simply  as  the  dissolution  of  the 
natural  body,  but  also  as  exclusion  from  return  out  of  the 
underworld  or  practical  extinction  of  being,  he  believed 
to  have  been  counteracted  through  the  mission  of  Christ 
for  all  who  became  his  followers.  The  bodies  of  those  in 
whom  Christ  dwelt  were,  indeed,  subject  to  death,  but  if 
the  Spirit  of  God  dwelt  in  them,  then,  on  account  of  or 
through  this  indwelling  Spirit,  their  mortal  bodies  would 
be  quickened  (Rom.  viii.  10,  11). 

Those,  then,  who  have  the  Spirit  as  a  "pledge,"  and  in 
whom  dwells  the  second  Adam  who  was  "a  life-giving 
Spirit,"  may  be  assured  that  though  their  outward  man 
perish,  their  inward,  essential  life  cannot  be  touched  by 
moral  dissolution,  and  that,  if  dead  at  the  time  of  the  Parou- 
sia,  they  will  be  raised,  and  if  living,  changed,  so  that 
corruption  will  for  them  have  put  on  incorruption.  The 
indwelling  Spirit  appears,  accordingly,  to  be  regarded  as 
the  condition  and  the  principle  of  the  transformation  or  the 
resurrection  whereby  the  mortal  puts  on  immortality.  The 
illustration  by  which  in  i  Cor.  xv.  35  ff.  the  apostle  attempts 
to  explain  the  mystery  of  the  resurrection  ma}^  perhaps  be 


436  THE    TEACHER 

related  to  this  doctrine,  although  in  this  place  he  appears 
to  have  forgotten  the  transformation  of  the  living  when  he 
says,  ''that  which  thou  sowest  is  not  quickened  except  it 
die."  Just  as  there  remains  in  the  seed  that  perishes  in 
the  ground  a  life-principle  which  untouched  by  decay  be- 
comes the  germ  of  the  grain  that  grows  from  it,  so  the 
indwelling  Spirit  is  in  believers  an  indestructible  principle 
by  which  their  resurrection  is  assured.  A  strict  applica- 
tion of  the  analogy  would  require  the  indwelling  of  the 
irvevfjLa  in  the  body,  and  it  is  not  clear  how  the  soul  of  the 
believer  in  the  underworld  is  conceived  to  be  connected 
with  the  body  in  the  grave,  out  of  which  according  to  the 
illustration  the  incorruptible  body  is  supposed  to  spring. 
But  doubtless  the  analogy  should  not  be  pressed  too  far. 
It  is  evident  in  any  case  that  in  the  apostle's  thought  the 
Jewish  doctrine  of  the  resurrection  of  the  dead  was  en- 
tirely transformed. 

This  view  of  the  resurrection-body  as  coming  from  the 
former  body  after  the  analogy  of  new  grain  from  a  seed  is 
not  easily  reconcilable  with  the  passage  in  2  Cor.  v.  i  ff. 
ill  which  Paul  writes  of  the  spiritual  body  as  a  "  house 
not  made  with  hands,  eternal,  in  the  heavens."  The 
words,  ''  For  we  know  that  if  the  earthly  house  of  our 
tabernacle  be  dissolved,  we  have  a  building  from  God," 
evidently  imply  the  thought  of  death  prior  to  the  Parousia ; 
and  the  longing  to  be  "  clothed  upon  "  and  not  to  be 
''found  naked  "  expresses  a  shrinking  from  the  condition 
of  a  bodiless  spirit  in  the  underworld,  while  absence  from 
the  body  and  presence  with  the  Lord  exclude  a  tarrying  in 
hades  between  death  and  the  resurrection.  The  present 
tense,  "we  have "  (e;Yo/>tet'),  cannot  be  understood  of  an 
ideal  possession  of  something  which  is  to  be  had  at  the 
time  of  the  future  Parousia,  but  expresses  the  certainty  of 
an  actual  possession.     The  "building  "  for  the  soul  abhor- 


ESCHATOLOGY  437 

ring  the  nakedness  of  the  state  of  being  in  sheol  is  now 
ready,  so  that  the  Christian,  weary  of  the  struggle  of  life 
in  '*  this  tabernacle,"  where  he  "  groans  "  and  is  **  burdened," 
and  whence  he  has  a  "  desire  to  depart  and  be  with  Christ" 
(Phil  i.  23),  may,  should  he  die  before  "the  day  of  the 
Lord,"  at  once  enter  into  his  "everlasting"  tent-habitation. 
It  is  probable  that  Paul,  when  he  wrote  the  passage  in 
question  and  the  one  in  Philippians  referred  to,  had  rea- 
son to  think  that  he  might  not  survive  until  the  longed-for 
coming  of  his  Lord,  and  in  his  eagerness  to  be  immediately 
with  him  conceived  of  this  spiritual  body  ready  to  receive 
him  in  heaven.  If  what  he  wrote  out  of  this  mood  cannot 
be  made  to  accord  with  his  doctrine  of  the  resurrection,  it 
is  because  he  sometimes  wrote  rather  from  the  mood  of 
the  hour  than  with  a  system  of  theology  in  view.* 

*  There  is  no  warrant  on  exegetical  grounds  for  limiting  the  "we"  in  this 
section  (2  Cor.  v.  i-io)  to  the  apostle,  as  if  he  expected  by  a  "prerogative  of 
grace  "  to  be  made  an  exception  to  the  believers  in  general.  Against  this  is 
"  We  that  are  in  this  tabernacle  "  (verse  4),  and  "  the  Spirit,"  on  the  possession 
of  which  the  hope  in  question  is  based  (verse  5),  is  everywhere  assumed  to 
dwell  in  all  Christians.  Likewise  "we  all  "  in  verse  10  does  not  denote  a 
transition  of  thought  from  the  apostle  to  the  believers  generally.  There  is  no 
indication  that  the  apostle  had  in  mind  the  resurrection  at  the  Parousia  when 
he  wrote  this  section.  The  point  of  view  from  which  the  interpretation  must 
proceed  is  in  verse  3 :  "If  so  be  that  being  clothed,  we  shall  not  be  found 
naked."  It  is  from  this  condition  of  being  "naked"  (7i;/iJ'6s),  that  is,  a  bodi- 
less spirit  in  the  underworld,  that  he  shrinks.  Death,  then,  prior  to  the  Pa- 
rousia is  evidently  implied  as  a  possibility  in  icaraXvOrj  ("  were  dissolved ") 
verse  i,  and  the  doctrine  of  an  immediate  presence  with  the  Lord  in  the  new 
heavenly  body  from  the  moment  of  death  can  hardly  be  exegetically  contested. 
Otherwise  the  being  "  found  naked  "  were  pointless.  This  is  not  a  resurrection 
of  the  dead  in  any  sense  of  the  term  known  to  Paul  or  intelligible  to  his  read- 
ers. For  this  was  conceived  as  appointed  to  take  place  at  the  Parousia,  and  in 
the  interval  the  dead  were  "  asleep,"  and  were  not  "  clothed  upon  with  the 
house  which  is  from  heaven."  The  doctrine  of  this  section  is  also  expressed 
in  Phil.  i.  23,  "  Having  a  desire  to  depart  and  be  with  Christ,"  in  which  an 
intermediate  state  is  excluded. 

Although  this  teaching  is  irreconcilable   with  the   apostle's  doctrine  of  the 


438  THE    TEACHER 

A  prominent  feature  of  the  Parousia  is  the  Messianic 
judgment.  In  accordance  with  the  Jewish  apocalyptic, 
Paul  believed  that  when  the  Messiah  should  come  he  would 
execute  judgment  upon  the  world  and  in  particular  upon 
the  Christians.  Accordingly,  the  occasion  of  the  advent 
is  often  characterised  as  *'  the  day  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  " 
and  ''the  day  of  Christ"  (i  Cor.  i.  8,  v.  5  ;  2  Cor.  i.  14,  v. 
10;  Phil.  i.  6,  10,  ii.  16).  A  judgment  by  Christ  is 
plainly  implied  in  the  passage  in  i  Thess.  ii.  19  already 
referred  to:  ''For  what  is  our  hope  or  joy  or  crown  of 
glorying }  Are  not  even  ye,  before  our  Lord  Jesus  at  his 
coming  }  "  It  is  unequivocally  expressed  in  the  declaration  : 
"  He  that  judgeth  me  is  the  Lord.  Wherefore  judge  noth- 
ing before  the  time,  until  the  Lord  come,  who  will  both 
bring  to  light  the  hidden  things  of  darkness,  and  make 
manifest  the  counsels  of  the  hearts  "  (i  Cor.  iv.  4,  5),  and 
in  the  words  previously  quoted  :  "  For  we  must  all  be  made 

resurrection  at  the  Parousia  in  i  Thessalonians  and  i  Corinthians,  it  cannot  be 
said  that  he  abandoned  the  latter.  For  it  is  expressly  indicated  in  this  very 
Epistle  (2 Cor.  iv.  14),  "shall  raise  us  up  also,"  and  in  a  later  Epistle  (Phil.  iii. 
11),  "I  might  attain  unto  the  resurrection  of  the  dead."  The  Epistle  to  the 
Romans,  also  written  later  than  2  Corinthians,  not  only  contains  no  intimation 
of  the  ideas  of  2  Cor.  v.  i-io,  but  proceeds  in  its  eschatological  allusions  upon 
the  presumption  of  the  resurrection.  In  Rom.  i.  4  "  the  resurrection  of  the 
dead  "  means  that  of  the  believers  in  general,  Christ  being  "  the  first-born  from 
the  dead."  In  vi.  5  the  fellowship  of  the  believers  with  Christ  will  have  as  its 
result  their  "  resurrection."  In  viii.  1 1  the  quickening  of  the  mortal  bodies 
on  account  of  the  indwelling  TrveO/ia  can  be  understood  only  of  the  raising  up 
of  spiritual  bodies.  So  also  probably  **  life  from  the  dead"(xi.  15).  From 
the  point  of  view  of  an  unbiassed  exegesis  no  reconciliation  is  possible  of  these 
conflicting  teachings  which  Paul  has  himself  left  unreconciled.  It  is  worthy 
of  note  that  the  eschatology  which  he  has  most  elaborated  (based  upon  the 
Jewish  theology),  that  of  the  resurrection,  appears  to  commend  itself  less  to 
the  enlightened  Christian  consciousness  than  the  other  (derived  from  Hellen- 
ism), that  of  the  immediate  departure  of  the  believer  at  death  "to  be  with 
Christ."  —  See  Pfleiderer,  Urc/vistent/mm,  pp.  299  f.;  Schmiedel,  Hand- 
Cofnmentar  on  2  Cot.  \.  iff.;  2iX\(XTe\chxi\2Lnx\,  Die  paulitiischtvi  Vorstelltingen 
von  Auferstehung  und  Gcricht,  etc. 


ESCHATOLOGY  439 

manifest  before  the  judgment-seat  of  Christ,  that  each  may 
receive  the  things  done  in  the  body  "  (2  Cor.  v.  10).*  But 
in  apparent  opposition  to  this  teaching  and  in  accordance 
with  the  Jewish  monotheism  and  the  theology  of  the  Old 
Testament  Paul  declares  with  equal  explicitness  that  God 
is  the  Judge  of  men,  and  the  implication  is  hardly  mistaka- 
ble  that  it  is  His  judgment  which  will  be  executed  at  the 
Parousia  in  the  words  :  "  For  we  shall  all  stand  before  the 
judgment-seat  of  God  "  (Rom.  xiv.  10).  To  the  same  effect 
is  I  Thess.  iii.  13:  "Unblamable  in  holiness  before  our 
God  and  Father  at  the  coming  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ," 
and  "In  the  day  when  God  shall  judge  the  secrets  of 
men,  according  to  my  Gospel,  by  Jesus  Christ  "  (Rom. 
ii.  16).  Other  passages  to  the  same  effect  are:  "Them 
that  are  without  God  judgeth,"  and  "Treasurest  up  for 
thyself  wrath  against  the  day  of  wrath  and  revelation  of 
the  righteous  judgment  of  God"  (i  Cor.  v.  13;  Rom.  ii. 
5).  These  two  points  of  view,  judgment  executed  by 
Christ  and  by  God,  probably  admit  of  reconciliation  on 
the  ground  of  the  supremacy  of  the  Deity  and  the  sub- 
ordinate agency  of  Christ.  God  is  the  supreme  Judge, 
and  effects  His  judicial  work  "by  Jesus  Christ." 

The  manner  in  which  Paul  conceived  that  the  judgment 
of  "the  day  of  the  Lord  "  would  be  effected  is  involved  in 
some  obscurity,  and  it  is  not  always  clear  whether  the  terms 
that  he  employs  are  to  be  understood  as  literal  or  figura- 
tive. It  is  evident,  however,  that  the  Messianic  judgment 
of  the  Parousia  would  test  and  reveal  men's  work,  and 
affix  rewards  and  penalties  in  accordance  therewith.     Sal- 

*  "The  view  of  Paul  here  appears  to  be  that  the  believers  are  indeed 
destined  to  life  (i  Cor.  v.  5,  xi.  32),  but  that  in  this  judgnjent  their  reward  vv^ill 
be  differently  determined  (i  Cor.  iii.  14),  and  will  consist  perhaps  in  a  position 
nearer  to,  or  more  remote  from,  God  and  Christ,  or  in  a  crw/za  iiroypdvLOP  more 
or  less  radiant  (i  Cor.  xv.  40,  41)."  —  Holsten,  Die paiilin.  TIieoL  p.  130. 


440  THE    TEACHER 

vation  by  faith  does  not  exclude  judgment  and  award 
according  to  works.  Faith  and  the  possession  of  the  Spirit 
consequent  upon  it  will  save  from  destruction  on  the  great 
day  of  wrath,  but  the  judgment  must  determine  each  man's 
rank  and  standing.  Thus  is  solved  the  antimony  which 
Professor  Pfleiderer  finds  between  the  Pauline  doctrines  of 
judgment  and  salvation  by  faith.  The  justified  by  faith 
may  well  be  supposed  to  be  included  in  a  judgment  from 
which  "angels"  were  not  exempt  (i  Cor.  vi.  3).  Unmis- 
takable words  of  the  apostle's  make  it  certain  that  he 
included  believers  in  the  final  judgment  at  the  coming  of 
Christ,  although  there  seems  to  be  no  place  for  the  process 
of  judging  them  in  the  brief  and  vivid  sketch  of  the 
Parousia  in  i  Thess.  iv.  15-18,  where  it  is  simply  declared 
that  the  believers  who  had  died  would  be  raised  and  the 
living  Christians  (presumably  "changed"  according  to 
I  Cor.  XV.  52)  would  be  "caught  up"  with  them  in  the 
clouds  to  be  forever  with  the  Lord.  But  a  place  for 
their  judgment  must  have  been  reserved  in  his  thought, 
for  he  writes  to  the  Corinthian  believers  that  they  should 
"judge  nothing  before  the  time,  until  the  Lord  come,  who 
will  both  bring  to  light  the  hidden  things  of  darkness,  and 
make  manifest  the  counsels  of  the  hearts."  Then  each  of 
them  will  "have  his  praise  from  God,"  that  is,  to  each 
will  be  assigned  the  commendation  and  award  which  are 
due  to  him  according  to  the  degree  of  his  fidelity. 

The  searching  and  destroying  work  of  this  judgment 
is  indicated  in  the  declaration  that  the  day  "is  revealed 
in  fire."  *     The  work  of  every  teacher  who  builds  on  the 

*  Compare  the  words  in  the  probably  spurious  second  Epistle  to  the  Thes- 
salonians,  i.  8 :  "  The  revelation  of  the  Lord  Jesus  from  heaven  with  the  angels 
of  his  power  in  flaming  fire,  rendering  vengeance  to  them  that  know  not 
God."  See  also  4  Ezra  xiii.  9  :  '^  De  ore  siio  sicut  Jlatiim  ignis,  et  de  labiis 
spiritus JiinmncE  et  de  lingua  ejus  emitlebat scintillas  et  tempestateSy^''  etc. 


ESCHA  TOL  OGY  44 1 

foundation  that  Paul  has  laid  will  be  proved  by  the  fiery 
judgment  of  the  Parousia.  The  teacher's  work  which 
stands  the  test  abides,  and  the  workman  receives  a  reward, 
perhaps  honour,  a  ''crown  of  glory,"  in  the  Messianic 
kingdom,  for  it  must  be  kept  in  mind  that  the  award  in 
question  is  no  other  than  that  to  be  determined  at  the 
Parousia.  But  the  Christian  teacher  whose  work  shall 
be  "burned  up"  will  lose  the  reward  which  accrues  to  him 
who  has  built  of  imperishable  material,  though  he  himself, 
since  by  the  supposition  he  is  a  believer,  and  possesses  the 
indestructible  Spirit,  will  be  saved,  "yet  so  as  by  fire"  (i 
Cor.  iii.  10-15).  That  this  judgment  would  also  be  held 
upon  the  believers  who  were  to  be  raised  at  the  coming  of 
Christ  there  can  be  no  doubt.  For  their  possession  of  the 
Spirit  which  assures  their  resurrection  should  not  be 
regarded  as  exempting  them  from  the  test  that  would  de- 
termine their  position  as  partakers  of  the  "glory"  of  the 
spiritual  kingdom  to  be  established  at  the  Parousia.  The 
declaration  that  "  we  must  all  be  made  manifest  before  the 
judgment-seat  of  Christ "  applies  to  Christians  regardless 
of  their  having  died  or  not  prior  to  "the  day  of  the 
Lord  "  (Rom.  xiv.  10 ;  2  Cor.  v.  10). 

The  passages  in  i  Corinthians  and  i  Thessalonians, 
already  quoted,  in  which  the  apostle  describes  the  Parousia, 
are  so  much  occupied  with  the  fortune  of  believers  that 
they  contain  no  indication  or  intimation  of  the  judgment 
of  unbelievers  or  of  their  fate.  Definite  declarations  on 
this  subject  are,  however,  found  in  other  places,  so  that 
there  is  no  doubt  that  Paul  believed  that  those  who  had 
not  accepted  Christ  would  be  judged  and  condemned  at 
the  Parousia.  Such  a  judgment  is  presupposed  in  the 
announcement  made  to  the  Corinthians  that  the  saints 
would  judge  the  world  (fcoa/jLo^,  i  Cor.  vi.  2),  in  which 
it    is    doubtless  implied    that    they  would    together    with 


442  THE    TEACHER 

Christ  sit  in  judgment  on  sinners  at  the  ''end  of  the 
age."  So  exalted  was  to  be  their  position,  indeed,  that 
even  "  angels  "  would  be  judged  by  them  (verse  3).  There 
is  no  ambiguity  in  the  words  addressed  to  him  who  treas- 
ures up  "  wrath  in  the  day  of  wrath  and  revelation  of  the 
righteous  judgment  of  God,"  and  the  announcement  of 
"  wrath  and  indignation,  tribulation  and  anguish,  upon  every 
soul  of  man  that  worketh  evil "  (Rom.  ii.  5,  9).  An  awful 
warning  is  conveyed  in  the  reference  to  the  Israelites  who 
yielded  to  temptation  or  murmured  in  the  wilderness,  and 
perished  by  "  the  serpents  "  or  "  the  destroyer."  This  hap- 
pened to  them,  says  the  apostle,  "  by  way  of  example  ";  and 
''they  were  written  for  our  admonition  upon  whom  the  ends 
of  the  ages  are  come"  (i  Cor.  x.  9-1 1).  More  explicit  is 
the  declaration  that  "the  day  of  the  Lord"  would  come 
unexpectedly  upon  the  wicked,  who  flatter  themselves  that 
they  are  in  "peace  and  safety,"  but  who  will  be  visited 
with  "sudden  destruction"  from  which  "they  shall  in  no 
wise  escape"  (i  Thess.  v.  3). 

The  doom  of  the  unbelievers  at  the  Parousia  was  regarded 
by  Paul  as  the  direct  opposite  of  the  blessedness  upon 
which  the  believers  were  to  enter.  The  latter  was  salva- 
tion, deliverance  (o-corrjpLa),  escape  from  the  death  which 
was  the  penalty  of  sin.  Over  those  who  were  "in  Christ  " 
death  had  no  dominion.  The  Christians  who  had  "fallen 
asleep"  prior  to  "the  day  of  the  Lord"  would  come  forth 
from  the  underworld  at  the  sound  of  ''  the  last  trump," 
would  be  "raised  incorruptible,"  and  those  living  at  that 
time  would  be  suddenly  clothed  upon  with  bodies  fashioned 
after  the  likeness  of  Christ's  "  body  of  glory."  Death  could 
no  more  hold  the  former  or  have  power  over  the  latter  than 
it  could  avail  to  retain  Jesus,  their  Master,  "the  first  fruits 
of  them  that  slept,"  after  he  was  laid  in  the  tomb.  "De- 
struction," "perishing,"  are  the  terms  employed  by  Paul 


ESCHATOLOGY  443 

to  express  the  fate  of  the  wicked.  For  those  of  them  who 
had  died  before  the  corning  of  Christ  to  judgment  there 
was  no  return  from  the  underworld,  no  real  life.  Only 
those  in  whom  dwelt  the  Spirit,  that  is,  those  who  were  *'  in 
Christ,"  had  the  "earnest  of  the  Spirit,"  "the  redemption 
of  their  bodies,"  the  hope  of  the  resurrection,  the  promise 
of  "life."  The  "end  "  of  the  adversaries  of  the  cross  of 
Christ  is  "destruction  "  (aTrcoXem,  Phil.  iii.  19).  The  gospel 
is  veiled  "  in  them  that  are  perishing ;  in  whom  the  god  of 
this  world  hath  blinded  the  minds  of  the  unbelieving,  that 
the  light  of  the  gospel  of  the  glory  of  Christ  .  .  .  should 
not  dawn  upon  them  "  (2  Cor.  iv.  3,  4).  A  most  unmistaka- 
ble expression  of  this  doctrine  is  in  the  words  in  which  the 
apostle  treats  of  the  resurrection  of  believers  as  related  to 
that  of  Christ.  If  Christ  was  not  raised,  then  there  is  no 
resurrection  of  those  who  have  fallen  asleep  in  him,  but 
they  are  "perished,"  that  is,  they  are  doomed  to  remain 
in  the  underworld,  for  Christ  would  never  come  with  the 
sound  of  the  trumpet  that  should  call  them  forth  from  their 
eternal  sleep. 

The  only  way  in  which  it  was  supposed  that  one  who 
had  died  an  unbeliever  could  escape  from  the  underworld, 
or  be  raised  from  the  dead,  was  by  "  baptism  for  the  dead." 
This  is  the  sole  exception  mentioned  or  intimated  by 
Paul  to  the  principle  that  those  who  had  died  "  in  Christ " 
would  participate  in  the  resurrection.  He  does  not,  in- 
deed, expressly  approve  this  vicarious  baptism,  and  it  is 
not  probable  that  he  could  so  far  have  disregarded  his 
fundamental  doctrine  of  salvation  by  faith  as  to  approve 
it ;  but  the  fact  that  the  custom  was  in  vogue  among  those 
whom  he  had  taught  shows  that  they  had  learned  from 
him  that  there  was  no  hope  at  the  Parousia  for  those  who 
had  died  out  of  Christ.  Hence  their  device  of  baptizing 
the  living  for  those  who  had  so  died,  in  order  that   the 


444 


THE   TEACHER 


latter  might  be  vicariously  brought  into  such  a  relation 
with  Christ  as  to  secure  their  resurrection.  If  all  the 
dead  were  to  be  raised,  baptism  for  any  of  them  would  be 
superfluous.  Accordingly,  Paul  asks  from  this  point  of 
view  :  *'  If  the  [Christian]  dead  rise  not,  what  are  they 
doing  who  are  baptized  for  the  dead?"  (i  Cor.  xv.  29). 
As  to  the  unbelievers  living  at  the  time  of  the  Parousia, 
Paul  says  very  little  that  is  specific.  The  inference  that 
they  were  not  thought  by  him  to  be  included  among  the 
saved  in  the  kingdom  of  God  is  unmistakable  from  the  fact 
that  the  words  "  we  shall  be  changed,"  and  ''  we  who  are 
alive,  we  who  are  left,  shall  be  caught  up,"  manifestly  refer 
to  the  believers  only.  They  alone  who  had  the  indwelling 
TTvev/jLa  could  be  "raised"  or  '* changed,"  and  there  is  no 
intimation  in  the  apostle's  writings  that  the  work  of  con- 
version would  go  on  at  or  after  the  coming  of  Christ.  It 
is  to  judgment  that  the  Lord  was  to  come,  not  to  evan- 
gelisation. The  hope  expressed  for  the  salvation  of  *'all 
Israel"  after  the  ''fulness  of  the  gentiles"  should  have 
come  in  (Rom.  xi.  25,  26)  appears  to  indicate  that  he  be- 
lieved, when  he  wrote  this  passage  at  least,  that  there 
would  remain  no  unconverted  Jews  or  gentiles  at  the 
time  of  the  Parousia. 

But  if  ''fulness"  and  "all"  be  understood  here  as  in- 
cluding the  totality  of  Jews  and  gentiles  living  at  the 
coming  of  Christ,  the  apostle  is  in  irreconcilable  contra- 
diction with  himself.  For  apart  from  the  fact  that  the 
frequent  references  to  the  "destruction"  and  "perishing" 
of  the  wicked  can  only  with  the  greatest  arbitrariness  be 
referred  to  those  of  them  alone  who  should  die  uncon- 
verted, the  apostle  makes  most  explicit  declarations  of  a 
judgment  upon  living  unbelievers  at  the  Parousia  who 
treasure  up  for  themselves  "wrath  in  the  day  of  wrath 
and  revelation  of  the  righteous  judgment  of  God,"  and 


ESCHATOLOGY  445 

whom  on  ''the  day  of  the  Lord"  ''sudden  destruction" 
would  overtake.  In  what  manner  Paul  thought  that  the 
"  sudden  destruction  "  of  the  wicked  would  be  accom- 
plished at  the  Parousia,  and  whether  he  believed  as  did 
the  apocalyptic  writer  of  2  Thessalonians  that  Christ 
would  come  "with  the  angels  of  his  power  in  flaming 
fire  rendering  vengeance  to  them  that  know  not  God," 
are  questions  which  it  is  idle  to  attempt  to  answer.  He 
does  not  hesitate  to  proclaim  the  terrors  of  the  divine 
"  wrath  "  which  would  be  revealed  at  that  time,  and  if  he 
thought  of  the  Messiah  as  coming  to  bring  "perdition" 
to  the  "adversaries"  of  his  cause  (Phil,  i  28),  he  was 
at  least  in  accord  with  the  apocalyptic  of  his  age.  At 
all  events,  it  is  unreasonable  to  suppose  in  the  absence  of 
specific  teachings  to  this  effect  that  he  could  have  believed 
that  the  living  who  had  not  accepted  Christ  were  reserved 
for  a  better  fortune  in  "  the  day  of  the  Lord  "  than  that 
of  the  unbelievers  who,  having  died  without  union  with 
the  "  life-giving  Spirit,"  were,  in  accordance  v/ith  a  funda- 
mental principle  of  his  teaching,  consigned  without  hope 
to  the  underworld. 

The  question,  however,  of  the  fate  of  unbelievers  who 
should  not  survive  until  the  Parousia,  or  of  that  of  a  second 
resurrection,  is  of  so  much  importance  in  the  Pauline 
eschatology  as  to  demand  a  somewhat  detailed  consider- 
ation. In  the  first  place,  it  is  of  no  little  significance  in 
the  discussion  of  this  problem  that  the  apostle  does  not 
explicitly  afifirm  the  resurrection  of  unbelievers,  while  as 
to  that  of  believers  he  leaves  no  doubt.  It  is,  then,  only 
by  an  inference  from  somewhat  ambiguous  expressions 
that  the  former  can  be  at  all  maintained  as  a  teaching  of 
his.  The  declaration  that  "  As  in  Adam  all  die,  so  also 
in  Christ  shall  all  be  made  alive"  (i  Cor.  xv.  22),  appears 
to  teach  the  resurrection  of  all  men  irrespective  of  their 


446  THE    TEACHER 

spiritual  condition.  These  words  cannot,  however,  be 
fairly  interpreted  by  themselves,  but  must  be  related  to 
the  apostle's  fundamental  doctrine  that  the  hope  of  the 
resurrection  is  grounded  upon  the  possession  of  the  Spirit 
(Rom.  viii.  ii).  By  this  doctrine  the  "all"  in  the  second 
clause  must  evidently  be  limited  to  those  who  during  their 
lives  should  have  fulfilled  the  condition  of  participating  in 
the  resurrection  at  the  Parousia  by  believing  in  Christ. 

In  like  manner  must  the  passage  be  interpreted  :  "  For 
as  through  one  man's  disobedience  the  many  were  made 
sinners,  even  so  through  the  obedience  of  one  shall  the 
many  be  made  righteous"  (Rom.  v.  19),  where  ''the 
many,"  in  the  second  clause,  is  obviously  limited  by  the 
condition  of  accepting  Christ  by  faith.*  But  that  all  would 
not  have  accepted  Christ  prior  to  the  final  judgment  at 
the  Parousia  is  as  clear  as  words  can  make  it ;  else  on 
whom  were  to  fall  the  "  wrath  "  and  the  "  sudden  destruc- 
tion "  on  that  day  t  The  context  of  the  passage  in  i  Cor. 
XV.  22  shows  Paul  to  have  had  believers  only  in  mind. 
Just  before  he  says  that  if  Christ  was  not  raised,  then 
those  "who  are  fallen  asleep  in  Christ  are  perished,"  and 
"  if  in  this  life  only  we  [Christians]  have  hoped  in  Christ, 
we  are  of  all  men  most  pitiable"  (verses  18,  19).  Accord- 
ingly, in  verse  22,  his  thought  is  :  "  i\s  in  Adam  all  die,  so 
also  in  Christ  shall  [we]  all  be  made  alive."  He  then 
goes  on  to  say  that  there  is  a  certain  "  order"  (rd'yixa)  in 
the  resurrection,  Christ  being  the  first  fruits,  then  they 
that  are  Christ's  at  his  coming ;  but  there  is  no  mention 
of  those  who  are  not  Christ's.  To  suppose  that  he  be- 
lieved all  men,   good  and    bad,   to    be   Christ's    by   some 

*  The  limitation  is  dearly  expressed  in  verse  17  :  "  For  if  by  the  trespass  of 
the  one  death  reigned  through  the  one,  much  more  shall  t/iey  that  receive  the 
abundance  of  grace  and  of  the  gift  of  righteousness  reign  in  life  through  the  one, 
even  Jesus  Christ." 


ESC  HA  TOL  OGY  44/ 

natural  tie,  and  that  he  would  accordingly  claim  them  all 
at  the  resurrection,  is  to  run  counter  to  all  that  is  most 
characteristic  and  fundamental  in  the  apostle's  thought 
and  to  render  nugatory  his  doctrine  of  the  Spirit  and  of 
justification  by  faith. 

Only  two  groups  are  mentioned  into  which  those  who 
are  raised  are  distributed,  in  accordance  with  the  doc- 
trine that  each  man  is  to  be  raised  "  in  his  own  order," 
*'  Christ,  the  first  fruits,  then  they  that  are  Christ's  at  his 
coming."  "Then,"  says  Paul,  "  cometh  the  end."  The 
resurrection  of  the  wicked  might  be  supposed  to  be  im- 
plied here,  if  ''  end  "  means  the  end  of  the  resurrection.  Yet 
not  only  is  there  no  intimation  that  such  is  its  meaning, 
but  the  following  words  appear  to  define  it  beyond  mistake  : 
''  When  he  shall  deliver  up  the  kingdom  to  God,  .  .  . 
when  he  shall  have  abolished  all  rule  and  all  authority  and 
power."  "The  end"  must,  then,  be  understood  absolutely 
as  denoting  the  consummation  of  the  age  or  world-period, 
which  was  to  be  effected  at  the  Parousia.  The  resurrec- 
tion of  the  unbelievers  appears  to  be  implied  in  the 
doctrine  that  the  world  is  to  be  judged,  and  Meyer  so 
interprets  Paul.  But  the  passages  in  which  such  a  judg- 
ment is  declared  contain  no  implication  of  a  resurrection, 
and  may  fairly  be  interpreted  as  relating  only  to  those 
who  should  be  living  at  the  Parousia.* 

*  It  is  denied  by  some  expositors  that  Paul  regarded  Christ  as  constituting 
an  "  order  "  (rdyfxa)  in  the  resurrection.  They  accordingly  find  the  second 
"order"  implied  in  the  destruction  of  death  interpreted  in  the  sense  that  it 
means  the  giving  up  by  this  personified  power  of  the  unregenerate  spirits  that 
he  holds,  which  Christ  "  wins  from  him  in  the  last  conflicts."  So  Holtzmann. 
Hence  the  doctrine  of  a  second  resurrection,  that  of  those  who  had  not 
accepted  the  gospel.  But  the  winning  by  Christ  of  the  spirits  of  the  wicked 
from  death  has  no  other  support  than  the  doubtful  interpretation  of  rdyfj-a. 
If  Paul  conceived  that  during  his  "reign"  Christ  was  to  be  occupied  with  the 
evangehsation  of  the  living  and  dead  unbelievers,  he  has  nowhere  distinctly 


448  THE    TEACHER 

It  is  not  clear  how  long  Paul  conceived  that  the  period 
would  be  between  the  resurrection  of  ''  those  that  are 
Christ's "  and  "  the  end "  when  Christ  would  deliver  up 
the  kingdom  to  God.  There  is  no  reason  for  assuming 
that  he  believed  in  the  chiliastic  or  millenarian  doctrine. 
He  is  specific  enough,  however,  to  say  that  Christ  will 
reign  until  he  shall  have  abolished  all  rule  and  all  author- 
ity and  power,  until,  in  fact,  he  shall  have  put  all  enemies 
under  his  feet  (i  Cor.  xv.  24,  25).  It  is  evident  that  the 
/c6cr/jLo^  which  was  to  be  judged  at  the  great  assize  of  the 
Parousia  included  more  than  the  men  who  should  then  be 
living.  The  entire  existing  order  of  things  was  conceived 
by  Paul  as  hostile  to  the  new  spiritual  order  which  was 
to  come  with  the  advent  of  Christ  from  heaven  with  the 
celestial  powers.  The  wisdom  which  he  speaks  is  not  of 
this  world  whose  rulers  are  coming  to  naught.  God  has 
made  foolish  the  wisdom  of  this  world  (i  Cor.  i.  20,  ii.  6). 

Christ  came  to  deliver  the  believers  out  of  this  present 
evil  world  (Gal.  i.  4).  Here  the  time-period  (alcbv)  includes  all 
that  fills  it,  and  may  be  regarded  as  equivalent  to  the  /coa/xo^ 
which  does  not  know  God,  and  the  things  which  God  will 
bring  to  naught  (i  Cor.  i.  21,  28).  Chief  among  the  evil 
powers  which  were  to  be  subdued  to  Christ  was  "the  god  of 
this  world,"  *  the  Devil,  whose  sway  extended  over  the 
existing  age  until  the  Parousia.  All  spiritual  potentates  f 
were  to  be  put  down  during  the  Messianic  reign,  before  the 
kingdom  should  be  delivered  up.     All  evil  must  be  cast 

intimated  such  a  doctrine.  If  "he  held  it  along  with  his  unmistakable  teaching 
of  the  dTTwXeta  of  all  who  were  not  "  Christ's  at  his  coming,"  then  we  have 
here  another  of  the  "many  contradictions"  which  Schmiedel  finds  that  he 
"  united  in  himself." 

*  6  deds  rod  aldvos  totjtov  (2  Cor.  iv.  4) ;  see  also  Eph.  vi.  12,  KoaixoKpdrwp; 
John  xii.  31. 

t  irdcra  i^ovcria,  I  Cor.  xv.  24;   compare  Eph.  i.  21;   Col.  ii.  10. 


ESC  HA  TOL  OGY  449 

out  and  the  kingdom  made  perfect  before  it  was  handed 
over  to  the  perfect  God. 

It  was  probably  during  this  period  of  indefinite  extent 
that  Paul  believed  that  the  transformation  of  physical  nat- 
ure, "  the  whole  creation,"  was  to  be  effected.  He  represents 
"the  earnest  expectation  of  the  creation"  as  waiting  for 
"the  revealing  of  the  sons  of  God,"  and  as  "groaning  and 
travailing  in  pain  together."  For  it  "was  subjected  to 
vanity,  not  of  its  own  will,  but  by  reason  of  him  who  sub- 
jected it  in  hope  that  the  creation  itself  shall  be  delivered 
from  the  bondage  of  corruption  into  the  liberty  of  the 
glory  of  the  children  of  God"  (Rom.  viii.  19-22).  This 
idea  borders  closely  upon  the  apocalyptic  dream  of  the 
writer  of  2  Peter,  who  looked  for  the  passing  away  of  the 
heavens  with  a  great  noise,  the  dissolution  of  the  elements 
and  the  burning  up  of  the  world.  In  the  place  of  this 
doomed,  old,  sinful  order  of  things,  he  expected  to  see, 
according  to  the  promise  of  God,  "new  heavens  and  a  new 
earth,  wherein  dwelleth  righteousness  "  (2  Peter  iii.  10-13). 
It  is  probable  that  when  Paul  wrote  the  passage  in  Romans 
viii.  he  was  thinking  of  the  earth  when  dehvered  from  the 
bondage  of  corruption  as  the  theatre  of  the  reign  of  Christ 
with  the  saints.  The  idea  of  the  renovation  of  the  earth 
at  the  coming  of  the  Messiah  was  derived  from  the  Jewish 
apocalyptic,  just  as  the  idea  of  a  resurrection  and  a  formal 
judgment  came  from  the  Jewish  theology.*  But  the  former 
is  incompatible  with  the  doctrine  of  an  immediate  departure 
at  death  to  be  with  Christ,  and  the  latter  is  not  easily  rec- 

*  *'  In  this  connection  Paul  perhaps  thought  of  the  transformation  of  the 
whole  visible  creation  from  perishableness  into  imperishableness.  And  indeed, 
like  the  bodies  of  the  believing  children  of  God,  will  the  visible  creation  then 
beam  in  splendour  as  imperishable  light-matter.  But  there  will  then  be  no 
more  sin  to  be  punished  by  the  perishableness  of  the  creation.  In  this  view 
Paul  remained  attached  to  the  Jewish  consciousness  (Rom.  viii.  19;  cf.  Isa.  xi. 
6  ff.;   Ixv.  17-25;   Ps.  cii.  27)."  —  Holsten,  Die paulin.  Theol.^.  131. 

2G 


450  THE    TEACHER 

onciled  with  the  idea  of  the  ascension  of  the  resurrected 
saints  to  meet  the  Lord  *'in  the  air"  and  be  ''ever"  with 
him.  Professor  Pfleiderer's  opinion  appears  to  be  well 
grounded,  that  Paul  drew  some  of  his  eschatological  ideas 
from  the  Jewish  theology  and  the  Hellenistic  philosophy- 
represented  by  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon.  But  whatever 
may  have  been  the  sources  of  his  teaching,  there  is  no 
greater  incongruity  in  his  opinions  than  might  be  expected 
in  those  of  a  man  who  did  not  undertake  to  formulate  a 
''system"  either  of  theology  or  of  eschatology. 

In  his  teaching  of  the  conflict  of  Christ  at  the  Parousia 
with  the  spirit-powers  and  their  overthrow,  Paul  comes 
into  close  relation  with  the  Jewish  apocalyptic.  He  is 
also  in  accord  with  the  synoptic  tradition  v/hich  gives  great 
prominence  to  the  power  of  Jesus  over  evil  spirits,  and 
opens  its  story  with  an  account  of  a  victory  over  Satan  in 
the  wilderness.  That  Paul  shared  the  belief  of  the  Jews 
of  his  time  in  the  existence  and  baleful  influence  of  evil 
spirits,  no  one  can  doubt  who  carefully  studies  his  writings. 
"The  god  of  this  world  "  had  power  to  blind  the  under- 
standings of  unbelievers,  and  to  him  and  the  subordinate 
spiritual  potentates  were  due  the  corruption,  sin,  and  death 
which  were  in  the  world.  "Angels,"  that  is,  beings  capa- 
ble of  being  affected  by  passion,  were  supposed  to  be 
present  in  the  worshipping  assemblies  of  the  Christians,  and 
the  women  were  commanded  to  keep  themselves  veiled  on 
their  account  (i  Cor.  xi.  lo).  The  "rule  and  authority  and 
power"  which  Christ  would  put  down  at  his  coming  evi- 
dently include  the  hostile  agencies  like  the  "  world-rulers 
of  darkness"  spoken  of  in  Eph.  vi.  12,  for  the  apostle 
immediately  adds  :  "  He  shall  reign  until  he  hath  put  all 
enemies  under  his  feet."  Death,  perhaps  personified  as 
one  of  the  malignant  spirit-powers,  is  declared  to  be  the 
last  enemy  that  shall  be  destroyed.     This  foe  of  mankind, 


ESCHATOLOGY  45 1 

this  offspring  of  Sin,  who  had  "  reigned  from  Adam  to 
Moses,"  the  mighty  Messiah  would  subdue.  How  closely 
the  apostle's  thought  borders  upon  the  apocalyptic  concep- 
tions is  apparent  when  we  compare  the  destruction  of 
Death  in  the  lake  of  fire  in  the  Johannine  apocalypse  and 
the  judgment  of  the  Messiah  on  the  evil  spirits  in  the 
Enoch-parables.  The  destruction  of  death  may  be  regarded 
as  the  end  and  consummation  of  the  subjection  of  all  the 
powers  hostile  to  the  kingdom  of  God  which  was  to  come 
at  the  Parousia.  Death  exists  only  through  sin,  and  its 
destruction  is  involved  in  that  of  the  evil  forces  of  the 
world  and  the  evil  men  living  in  it.  Its  power  ends  with 
the  resurrection  of  the  believers,  who  shall  die  no  more. 
The  resurrection  of  the  wicked  is  not  necessary  to  this 
consummation,  since  they  ''are  perished,"  as  would  have 
been  the  case  even  with  believers,  had  not  Christ  been 
raised. 

Paul's  doctrine  of  the  resurrection  is  in  accord  with  some 
of  the  Jewish  teachings  on  the  subject  and  in  opposition 
to  others.  This  was  necessarily  the  case,  since  the  Jewish 
writings  present  contradictory  views  on  the  subject.  Some- 
times the  resurrection  of  Israelites  alone,  good  and  bad, 
appears  to  be  taught,  as  in  Daniel  and  2  Maccabees, 
and  sometimes  that  of  all  men,  while  according  to  Weber 
the  Talmudic-Midrashic  literature  does  not  recognise  the 
resurrection  of  all  the  dead,  but  of  the  righteous  only,  for 
whom  it  was  regarded  as  a  reward.  Paul,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  in  accord  with  this  latter  teaching,  which  may  have  been 
current  in  the  Jewish  theology  of  his  time.  But  while  the 
Jewish  theologians  limited  the  resurrection  to  pious  Israel- 
ites, Paul  included  in  it  all  believers  in  Christ  of  whatever 
nationality.  Accordingly,  he  based  the  resurrection  upon 
a  principle  unknown  to  the  current  doctrine,  a  principle 
derived   from    his    Christian    faith.     If    Christ    were    not 


452  THE    TEACHER 

raised  then  is  the  believer's  faith  vain,  and  those  who 
have  fallen  asleep  in  Christ  are  perished.  Without  this 
great  event  no  return  from  the  underworld  would  be  pos- 
sible ;  but  with  it  a  return  is  promised  to  those  who 
possess  the  Spirit,  that  is,  through  faith  have  come  into 
living  union  with  Christ  and  become  "his  body  and  sev- 
erally members  thereof"  (i  Cor.  xii.  27). 

The  Pauline  conception  of  the  resurrection  is  also  a 
refinement  and  spiritualisation  of  the  popular  doctrine 
according  to  which  the  resurrected  would  have  physical 
bodies  with  the  lusts  and  passions  pertaining  thereto  (see 
Matt.  xxii.  24  f.).  The  idea  of  incorruptible  spiritual 
bodies  conformed  to  Christ's  body  of  glory,  in  accordance 
with  the  conception  of  the  Spirit,  which  Christ  was  (/'  the 
Lord  is  the  Spirit "),  as  a  luminous  substance,  involves  a 
transformation  of  the  current  doctrine  of  the  future  life 
by  which  it  was  raised  to  a  higher  plane.  Membership  in 
the  Messianic  kingdom  implied  in  the  thought  of  Paul  a 
glorious  spiritual  existence  like  that  of  Christ  in  heaven 
prior  to  his  first  appearance  upon  the  earth  and  after  his 
resurrection.  Whether  this  existence  was  to  be  upon  the 
renovated  earth  or  elsewhere,  the  idea  evidently  involves  a 
transformation  of  the  materialistic  Jewish  Messianism.  It 
is  probable,  however,  that  the  apostle  retained  the  current 
doctrine  of  the  underworld,  although  he  does  not  employ 
the  word  which  designated  it  (aS?;?),*  and  makes  no  men- 
tion of  it  in  any  terms.  The  doctrine  of  the  resurrection 
of  believers  as  set  forth  in  i  Corinthians  and  i  Thessaloni- 
ans,  in  the  passages  already  referred  to,  evidently  implies 
that  of  the  underworld,  which  is  necessarily  involved  in 
the   rising   of   the   dead.     The  resurrection   of   the  dead 

*In  I  Cor.  XV.  55,  "O  grave  (aSr^s),  where  is  thy  victory?"  the  reading  of 
Lachmann,  Tischendorf,  Tregelles,  and  Westcott  and  Hort  is  "  death  "  {Qavan). 
This  reading  is  adopted  in  the  revised  version  of  the  New  Testament. 


ESCHATOLOGY  453 

(avdaraai';  veKpcov)  could  have  conveyed  no  other  idea  to 
his  Jewish  readers  than  that  of  the  coming  forth  of  the 
departed  from  an  intermediate  state  in  sheol.  Either  a 
shrinking  from  this  state  of  existence,  or  the  thought  of 
the  Parousia  and  resurrection  as  so  near  that  it  became 
a  fleeting  and  unimportant  moment  in  the  total  life  of 
believers,  led  him,  however,  to  a  doctrine  entirely  irrecon- 
cilable with  it,  that  of  an  immediate  departure  at  death  to 
be  with  Christ  in  heaven  (2  Cor.  v.  1-4 ;  Phil.  i.  23). 

The  indefiniteness  of  the  duration  of  the  Messianic 
kingdom  after  the  Parousia  has  already  been  referred  to. 
The  fact  that  the  apostle  lays  no  stress  upon  the  reign 
of  Christ  denotes  another  transformation  of  the  current 
apocalyptic  conceptions  which  his  great  and  original  mind 
effected.  Perhaps  Professor  Pfleiderer's  remark  is  not 
strictly  accurate  that  ''the  Parousia  according  to  Paul  did 
not  have  as  its  object  .  .  .  the  entrance  of  the  Messiah 
upon  his  kingly  dominion,  but  his  immediate  abdication  of 
it  to  God,"  since  the  subjection  of  the  opposing  powers 
and  the  reigning  until  all  enemies  are  put  under  his  feet 
involves  a  sway  of  no  inconsiderable  duration.  But  in 
accordance  with  the  Pauline  Christology  the  position  and 
work  of  Christ  are  here  those  of  a  subordinate  and  agent. 
It  is  not  he  who  subdues  all  things,  but  God,  and  to  God 
he  himself  is  to  become  subject  at  last  (i  Cor.  xv.  28). 
When  this  consummation  shall  have  been  effected,  when 
all  opposing  rule  and  authority  and  power  shall  have  been 
put  down,  then  the  kingdom  will  be  complete  and  fit  to  be 
delivered  up  to  the  Father.  Then,  when  sin  shall  have 
been  destroyed,  the  groaning  creation  set  free  from  ''  the 
bondage  of  corruption,"  and  all  "enemies,"  human  and 
demonic,  subjugated,  the  divine  perfection  of  the  kingdom 
will  be  signalised  by  its  entire  occupation  by  the  all-perfect 
God,  who  will  be  "all  in  all."     Manifestly,  the  "all"  in 


454  ^^^    TEACHER 

which  God  will  dwell  is  the  totality  of  the  kingdom,  out  of 
which  the  Messianic  conquest  will  have  banished  every- 
thing that  could  offend  the  divine  purity.  That  this  is  not 
a  doctrine  of  universal  restoration  is  evident  from  what 
has  already  been  shown  respecting  Paul's  teaching  of  the 
resurrection  at  the  Parousia  of  believers  only  and  the 
''destruction"  of  living  unbelievers.  It  is  equally  evident 
that  the  apostle  nowhere  teaches  the  doctrine  of  the  end- 
less punishment  of  the  wicked.  The  resurrection  of  those 
of  them  who  died  prior  to  "the  day  of  the  Lord  "  is,  as  we 
have  seen,  incompatible  with  one  of  his  fundamental 
principles,  and  punishment  in  the  underworld  is  unknown 
to  his  thought.  Living  or  dead,  they  belong  to  those  who 
"are  perishing,"  and  their  end  is  the  extinction  of  being, 
death,  from  which  nothing  can  save  but  the  indwelling 
of  the  divine  irvev^a.* 

*  Some  expositors  find  Paul  in  contradiction  with  himself  regarding  human 
destiny,  and  maintain  that  he  teaches  the  destruction  of  the  unbelievers  in  one 
series  of  passages  and  in  another  their  final  restoration.  The  former  doctrine 
is  found  in  the  words  *'  perishing  "  and  "  destruction  "  applied  to  the  wicked 
in  several  places,  among  which  may  be  mentioned  i  Cor.  i.  i8;  2  Cor.  ii. 
15  f.;  iv.  3;  Rom.  ii.  5-12;  Phil.  i.  28;  i  Thess.  v.  3.  Final  salvation  of  the 
wicked  is  held  to  be  taught  in  Rom.  v.  12-15,  ^S'  ^^^  ^^-  S^-  If  Rom,  v. 
12-21  be  considered  together  it  will  appear,  as  has  been  pointed  out  in  the 
text  above,  that  verse  1 7  denotes  a  qualification  of  the  extent  of  the  "  life  " 
that  through  Christ  is  set  over  against  the  sin  and  death  in  Adam,  to  the  effect 
that  it  is  the  portion  of  those  *'  who  receive  abundance  of  grace  and  of  the  gift 
of  righteousness."  The  attainment  of  "  life  "  is  thus  dependent  on  the  indi- 
vidual's r«?(r^?z//«^  what  God  graciously  offers  in  the  atonement.  Accordingly, 
if  in  verse  iS  "the  free  gift  come  upon  all  men  to  justification  of  life,"  it  can- 
not be  regarded  as  unqualifiedly  securing  "  life."  Justification  is  by  "  faith," 
and  Paul  knew  of  no  other;  but  faith  depends  upon  the  individual  to  whom 
this  kind  of  righteousness  is  offered.  Just  as  no  one  becomes  a  sinner  "  by 
the  offence  "  of  Adam  except  by  his  own  act,  so  no  one  is  justified  through  Christ 
but  by  his  act  of  faith.  If  Paul  meant  that  all  would  certainly  have  the 
required  faith,  he  neither  implies  it  here,  nor  says  it  elsewhere  (see  Rom.  iii. 
22,  26).  Rom.  xi.  32,  "He  hath  included  all  in  unbelief,  that  He  might  have 
mercy  upon  all,"  teaches  the  salvation  of  all  only  if  it  can  be  shown  to  be  a 


ESCHATOLOGY  455 

It  is  manifest  from  the  foregoing  sketch  of  the  Pauline 
doctrine  of  ''  the  last  things  "  that  it  by  no  means  presents 
a  complete  eschatology.  Apart  from  its  internal  incon- 
gruities, which  have  been  pointed  out,  it  falls  far  short  in 
many  respects  of  the  clear  and  precise  dogmatic  statement 
essential  to  give  it  a  place  in  a  system  of  theology.  It 
makes  no  provision  for  a  judgment  of  the  innumerable 
unrighteous  dead,  who  from  the  earliest  times  had  de- 
scended to  the  underworld.  They  appear  to  be  abandoned 
in  this    shadowy  realm    with    heartless    unconcern.     The 

Pauline  doctrine  that  the  divine  mercy  is  effective  independently  of  subjective 
conditions.  In  "the  fulness  of  the  gentiles"  and  "all  Israel"  (Rom.  xi. 
25,  26),  for  the  salvation  of  whom  prior  to  the  Parousia  Paul  hoped  against 
hope,  no  account  is  taken  of  the  dead.  That  the  unbelieving  dead  should  be 
raised  at  the  Parousia  requires  their  possession  of  ".the  Spirit,"  vi^hich  is  the 
condition  of  the  resurrection,  that  is,  their  evangelisation  in  the  underworld, 
of  which  there  is  no  hint  in  Paul's  writings.  The  conversion  of  Christ's 
"enemies"  is  not  implied  in  their  subjection  "under  his  feet."  Rather  their 
destruction  is  indicated  in  that  of  "the  last  enemy,  death"  (i  Cor.  xv.  25  f.). 
The  kingdom  is  the  domain  of  the  Spirit,  which  is  "  life,"  and  the  annihilation 
of  Death  and  his  realm  of  darkness  follows  upon  its  establishment.  Without 
sufficient  grounds  Schmiedel  finds  that  in  I  Cor.  xv.  24-28  the  conversion  of 
living  unbelievers  at  the  Parousia  before  the  "  end "  is  taught,  and  asks  why 
the  same  fortune  might  not  be  that  of  those  who  had  died  in  unbelief  prior 
to  the  Parousia.  Why  not,  indeed,  if  either  doctrine  or  rather  both  doctrines 
were  the  apostle's  ?  Teichmann  also  finds  that  Paul  teaches  both  the  destruction 
of  the  wicked  and  their  resurrection  as  possessors  of  the  Spirit,  the  latter  on 
the  ground  of  i  Cor.  xv.  22.  But  since  this  requires  a  doctrine  that  is  not 
Pauline,  the  preaching  of  Christ  to  shades  in  hades  and,  moreover,  the  cer- 
tainty that  all  would  accept  the  message,  the  interpretation  of  the  passage 
given  in  the  text  is  to  be  preferred  to  this  construction.  Holsten  interpreted 
I  Cor.  XV.  22  as  follows:  "  Since  the  former  Trdi^res  can  in  reality  refer  only  to 
those  who  bear  in  themselves  the  nature  of  Adam,  so  the  second  •n-di'res  can 
actually  relate  to  those  alone  who  have  the  nature  of  Christ,  that  is,  those  who 
through  faith  have  received  the  irueOfxa  toO  deoO  as  aTrapxv  of  the  heavenly 
goods,  and  as  dppa^tju  of  eternal  life  (Rom.  viii.  23;  2  Cor.  v.  5)."  For 
those  who  did  not  receive  the  Spirit,  the  pledge  {appa^ibv)  of  the  resurrection, 
prior  to  death  Paul  makes  no  provision.  He  gives  no  hint  of  the  doctrine  of 
a  "  second  probation  "  for  the  shades  in  hades. 


456  THE    TEACHER 

apostle's  eschatological  interest  seems  to  have  included 
only  the  Christian  dispensation  down  to  the  time  of  the 
Parousia,  and  the  kingdom  which  he  expected  soon  to  see 
appear  in  glory  was  to  have  as  its  subjects  only  those  who 
through  faith  had  accepted  Christ.  As  to  what  he  thought 
would  be  the  destiny  of  the  righteous  who  had  died  prior 
to  the  mission  of  Jesus,  —  the  prophets,  the  good  kings, 
the  saints,  —  we  are  left  entirely  to  conjecture,  for  he  has 
furnished  no  definite  data  for  a  theory  on  the  subject. 
The  exclusion  from  his  eschatological  scheme  of  the 
generations  of  men  who  have  lived,  or  may  live  after  the 
time  of  the  expected  "day  of  the  Lord,"  which  he  believed 
would  denote  the  close  of  the  human  historical  course  of 
affairs,  is  of  importance  with  reference  to  the  value  of  his 
eschatology  for  Christian  theology.  The  attempt  to  find 
in  it  a  doctrine  of  "the  last  things"  applicable  to  all  men 
of  all  the  ages  of  human  existence  on  the  earth  must 
evidently  be  abortive.  No  dogmatic  statement  of  the 
universal  destiny  of  mankind  can  be  extorted  from  his 
teachings.  His  conception  of  an  apocalyptic  judgment 
falls  with  the  transcending  of  its  time-limit  by  the  re- 
morseless course  of  events,  which  has  paid  no  heed  to 
dreams  of  "the  last  things"  and  dramatic  schemes  of  a 
final  assize.  Apocalypse  has  had  its  day,  and  must  now 
give  way  to  the  conception  of  an  evolution  of  human 
society  attended  by  a  constant,  silent  judgment  announced 
by  no  "trumpet"  or  "voice  of  an  archangel."  The 
teachings  of  the  apostle,  however,  incidental  to  his  escha- 
tology, which  are  grounded  upon  human  experience,  are  of 
permanent  worth  and  importance.  Chief  among  these  is 
the  doctrine  that  disaster  follows  sin  in  the  natural  rela- 
tion of  cause  and  effect,  that  "  whatsoever  a  man  soweth 
that  shall  he  also  reap ;  for  he  that  soweth  unto  his  own 
flesh  shall  of  the  flesh  reap  corruption."     On  the  other 


ESCHATOLOGY  457 

hand,  the  promise  of  victory  and  joy  is  to  those  who  come 
into  spiritual  fellowship  with  Christ,  and  righteousness  is 
regarded  as  the  certain  fruitage  of  a  seed  that  is  sown  in 
love  and  faith  :  "  He  that  soweth  unto  the  Spirit  shall  of 
the  Spirit  reap  eternal  life  "  (Gal.  vi.  8). 


INDEX   OF    SUBJECTS   AND    NAMES 


Abbot,  Dr.  E.,  298. 

Abraham,  the  promise  to  interpreted 
by  Paul,  9;  his  faith  accounted  as 
righteousness,  191. 

Acts,  on  Paul's  conversion,  53;  the 
discourses  in,  72;  on  Paul's  journey 
into  Arabia,  76;  omits  mention  of 
Titus,  80;  on  Paul's  first  missionary 
journey,  83;  on  other  journeys,  152; 
on  Paul's  apostleship,  84;  devia- 
tions in  from  actual  course  of  events, 
89;  omits  episode  between  Peter 
and  Paul  in  Antioch,  95;  on  Paul 
in  Athens,  105;  on  the  Corinthian 
Church,  106;  on  organisation  of 
the  Pauline  churches,  109  f.;  on 
Paul's  reception  in  Jerusalem  with 
the  collection,  135;  account  of 
Paul's  missions  in  contrast  with  the 
Epistles,  146  ff.,  158,  160-174;  ac- 
count of  Paul's  journey  from  Csesa- 
rea  to  Jerusalem,  143;  account  of 
circumcision  of  Timothy,  156;  hy- 
potheses as  to  character  and  com- 
position of,  146  f.;  on  the  Ephesian 
mission,  132  f.;  on  the  council  in 
Jerusalem,  172  f.;  on  Paul's  Naza- 
rite  vow,  154, 

Adam,  the  second,  15,  299,  307;  sin 
of  all  men  in,  233  f.;  and  Christ, 
218,  234,  240,  267,  290,  398;  the 
first,  241. 

Adoption  as  sons,  215. 

Allegorical  interpretation,  8-1 1. 

afxaprla,  sin  as  a  principle,  259. 

Angelology,  17. 

Anthropology,  22  f.,  225,  227. 

Antinomies,  49,  236  f.,  242,  245,  247  f., 
306,  379>  406,  410,  437  f. 


Antioch,  82,  85  f.;  composition  of 
Church  in,  81  f . ;  founding  of 
Church   in,    82. 

Apocalypse,  relation  of  to  eschatology, 
427,  429,  431. 

Apollos,    113;    party   of   in    Corinth, 

"5- 

Apostleship,  Paul's  claim  to,  32,  57, 
59,  61,  65,  75,  93,  115. 

Arabia,  55,  75,  148. 

Argument,  Paul's  method  of,  41-45. 

Atonement,  in  Romans,  142;  Paul's 
doctrine  of,  251-279;  implies 
change  on  God's  part,  260;  as  a 
sacrifice,  263  f.,  270;  ethical  theory 
of,  271  f. 

Baptism,  Paul's  doctrine  of,  414  ff.; 
for  the  dead,  417,  443;  Paul's  mys- 
tic conception  of,  322. 

Baring-Gould,  his  interpretation  of 
I  Cor.  ix.  5,  39. 

Barnabas,  80,  82,  86,  149  f. 

Baur,  298. 

Beasts,  Paul's  fight  with  at  Ephesus, 
131,  389,  428. 

Beyschlag,  305,  406. 

Biedermann,  309. 

Bishops,  III. 

Body  {(Twixa),  as  form,  221;  as  spirit- 
ual, 225,  244;  redemption  of,  220, 
225,  244;  celestial  and  terrestrial, 
434  f.;   of  glory,  244,  432,  452. 

Bovon,  239. 

Coesarea,  Paul's  journey  from  to  Jeru- 
salem, 143. 
"  Called,"  the,  401  f. 
Celibacy,  391. 


459 


460 


INDEX   OF  SUBJECTS  AND  NAMES 


Christ,  as  the  Son  of  God  and  the 
Messiah,  64,  282;  Paul's  seeing  of, 
59;  flesh  of  on  the  cross,  226,  265; 
agency  of  in  salvation,  252;  his 
humanity,  288  f.,  291 ;  death  of, 
254,  257,  263,  266,  274,  276,  286; 
his  satisfaction  of  the  law,  259 ; 
made  a  "curse,"  261,  267;  as  Son 
of  God,  285 ;  not  "  a  mere  man," 
287;  Paul's  doctrine  of  person  of, 
280-310;  in  "the  likeness  of  sin- 
ful flesh,"  226,  264  f.,  290;  preex- 
istence  of,  292,  294,  303 ;  divine 
nature  not  ascribed  to  him,  296  f,; 
as  judge,  302,  438  f.;  in  "the  form 
of  God,"  301,  303;  subordination 
of  to  God,  299,  ^ili^'y  relation  of  the 
justified  to,  360  f.;  reign  of,  448; 
resurrection  of,  117,  268,  272,  300, 
351.  368. 

Church,  Paul's  doctrine  of,  412  f. 

Cilicia,  89. 

Circumcision,  81,  94,  154;  of  Timo- 
thy, 156. 

Collection  for  the  poor,  134  f. 

Conversion,  the,  of  Paul,  53-66. 

Corinth,  mission  in,  105  ff.,  120  f. 

Corinthian  Church,  confusion  in,  -^t^  f., 
118;  Epistles  to  the,  121  ;  First 
Epistle  to  the,  34  f.,  107,  112  f.,  117, 
119;  Second  Epistle  to  the,  x.  i- 
xiii.  10,  47,  121,  125;  contents  of, 
119  f.;  the  tw^o  canonical  epistles  to 
the,  general  character  of,  126. 

Creation,  the  groaning,  245,  449 ; 
Christ's  participation  in  the,  294. 

Criticism  of  New  Testament,  method 
of,  280. 

Damascus,  55,  75,  149. 

Death,  the  penalty  of  sin,  16,  234, 
244,  264,  278;  Paul's  use  of  term, 
198  f.,  249;  of  the  believer  with 
Christ,  278;  baptism  into  the  of 
Christ,  415. 

Decree  of  council  in  Jerusalem,  172  f. 


Demetrius,  132. 

Demonology,  18. 

Depravity,  total,  248. 

Destiny  of  man,  45,  46. 

"  Destruction,"    205,    209,    249,    257, 

433. 
Determinism,  398  f. 
Deutero-Pauline  writings,  297. 
Development    of    doctrine     in    Paul, 

179. 
Devils,  the  cup  of,  44;  the  table  of, 

419. 
SiaKouoi,  III. 
Dickson,  227. 
Divorce,  391. 
Docetic  conception  of  Christ's  body^ 

291. 
Dwight,  Dr.  T.,  298. 

Ecstatic  phenomena,  46,  315  f.,  334. 
Education,  Paul's  Jewish,  6  f. 
Election,  400  f.,  405^409. 
rif.iafiToi'  icp"  (^  TrdfTes,  233  f. 
Enmity    of    man    toward    God,    257. 

268. 
Ephesians,  Epistle  to,  128. 
Ephesus,  mission  in,  128  f.,  153;   fight 

with    wild     beasts     in,     131,    398, 

428. 
Epilepsy,  Paul  probably  afflicted  with, 

25- 

eTrlcTKOITOl,    11 1. 

Epistles  of  Paul,  writings  of  the  occa- 
sion, 179. 

Equality  of  Paul  with  the  older  apos- 
tles, 38  f. 

Eschatology,  15  f.,  423-457;  "death," 
with  reference  to,  204  f.;  "life," 
with  reference  to,  208;  in  connec- 
tion with  salvation,  212,  252;  the 
Spirit  in  relation  to,  355  f.;  apoca- 
lyptic conception  of,  424;  ethical 
application  of,  427,  429. 

Ethical  sense  not  in  righteousness  by 
faith,  357  f.;  motives,  387  f.,  427, 
429;  theory  of  atonement,  271  f. 


INDEX   OF  SUBJECTS  AND  NAMES 


461 


Ethics  oF'  Paul,  370-397;  contrast  of 
with  that  of  Old  Testament,  373  f.; 
genesis  of,  375  ff.;  social,  396;  limi- 
tations of  Paul's,  456. 

Eudemonism,  427. 

Everett,  Dr.,  261. 

Everhng,  124. 

Evil  spirits,  overthrow  of,  450. 


Faith,  344;  righteousness  by,  54;  and 
justification,  342-369;    as  a  gift  of 
the  Spirit,  319;  in  Christ,  345;  with 
reference  to  the  life,  347;   not  the 
cause  of  justification,  357;  subordi- 
nate to  love,  422. 
Fall  of  man,  242. 
False  brethren,  the,  165  f. 
Farrar,  27. 

Fear  as  an  ethical  motive,  387. 
Felix,  143. 
Fellowship  with  Christ,  73,  139,  142, 

145;   of  the  Spirit,  413. 
Fenn,  W.  W.,  151,  152. 
Festus,  143. 

Flesh,  Christ  according  to  the,  14, 
281;  thorn  in  the,  24  f.;  the,  in 
the  anthropology  of  Paul,  220  f., 
229;  the,  ethically  regarded,  222, 
224,  227,  243;  the,  and  the  Spirit, 
226;  sinful,  Christ  in  the  likeness 
of,  226,  264  f.,  290. 
Forgiveness  not  prominent  in  Paul's 

teaching,  360. 
Fornicator,   Paul's  judgment   on  the, 

36. 
Freedom,  Paul's  conception  of,  38  f., 

247;   and  determinism,  404. 
Future,  prominence  of  in  thought  of 

Paul,  427. 

Galatia,  churches  of,  88. 

Galatians,  Epistle  to  the,  31  f.,  88-94. 

Gamaliel,  14. 

Genius,  the  religious  of  Paul,  14,  21, 

65. 
Gentile  converts,  the,  84. 


Gentiles,  the  apostleship  to  the,  54, 
62,  69,  80,  84;  relation  of  death 
of  Christ  to  the,  275. 

Gifford,  181. 

Gloel,  313. 

God,  love  of,  51,  258,  277;  monothe- 
istic conception  of,  297;  first  cause, 
398;  His  purpose  in  salvation,  400; 
His  foreknowledge  and  predestina- 
tion, 400  f. 

Gospel,  Paul's,  whence  derived,  74. 

Grace,  righteousness  imputed  by,  353  f., 

359.  361. 
Grafe,  181  f. 
Gunkel,  313  f.,  330,  332,  336. 


Hagadah,  its  influence  upon  Paul,  19  f. 
Harnack,  66,  10 1,  313. 
Hausrath,  27,  78,  156,  247. 
Heart,  the,  in  relation  to  faith,  346. 
Heathenism  and  Christianity  in  Cor- 
inth, 118,  126. 
Hebrews,  the  Epistle  to  the,  12. 
Heinrici,  37. 

Heirs,  the  behevers  as,  92. 
Hellenism,  49,  224,  245,  340,  416. 
Hellenist,  Paul  a,  14,  81. 
Hilgenfeld,  152. 
Holsten,  131,  181,  183,  248,  266,  270, 

292,  340,  350,  352,  396,  412. 
Holtzmann,  153,  155,  160  f.,  224,  229, 

258,  290,  301,  304,  406,  410,  416, 

447- 

Idolatry  and  idols,  44  f. 
Illumination,  Paul's  belief  in  his,  39. 
Illustrations  of  Jesus  and  Paul,  6. 
Image  of  God,  Christ  as  the,  288,  301, 
Imputation  of  righteousness,  353,  361. 
Incarnation,  the,  303;   Beyschlag  on, 

305- 
Incestuous  man,  the,  Paul's  judgment 

on,  36,  214. 
Independence,  Paul's  assertion  of  his, 

38,  147  f- 
Inheritance  of  the  kingdom,  402. 


462 


INDEX   OF  SUBJECTS  AND  NAMES 


Intercession  of  the  Spirit,  335. 
Interpretation  of  Old   Testament   by 

Paul,  8-14;   of  tongues,  316. 
Irony,  Paul's  use  of,  47. 
Inward  man,  the,  224,  243,  247. 

James,  30,  85,  86,  88;   at  the  council, 

171  f. 
Jerusalem,  Paul's  first  visit  to,  75  f.; 

agreement  in,  84  f.,  162  f.;   Paul's 

journey  to  with  the  collection,  135; 

council  in,  %2)  ^v  162  ff.,  168  f. 
Jeser  hara^  224  f. 

Jesus,  Paul's  acquaintance  with  teach- 
ings of,  76,  281  f.;   resurrection  of, 

see  "  Christ." 
Jewish-Christian      nucleus      in      the 

churches,   81. 
Jewish  method  of  interpretation,  8. 
Jowett  on  Christ  Kara.  adpKa,  14. 
Jubilees,  Book  of,  20. 
Judicial  conception  of  God's  relation 

to  man,  258. 
Justification  by  faith,  30,  87,  342-369; 

with  reference  to  eschatology,  43 1; 

through  the   atonement,   268,   272, 

300,  351,  368. 
Justify  (diKaiovv)  "forensic"  sense  of, 

351  f. 

Keim,  147. 

Kindliness  of  Paul,  33, 
Kingdom  of  God,  252,  282. 
Kostlin,  295. 
Krenkel,  25,  131. 

Last  Supper,  the,  Paul's  idea  of,  41 7  ff. 

Law,  the,  70,  87,  142;  Paul's  use  of 
term,  179-198;  its  relation  to  sin, 
187,  231  f.,  236;  its  historical  sig- 
nificance, 189;  as  interpreted  by 
Paul  and  by  the  Jewish  Christians, 
185,  237;  satisfaction  of  by  Christ, 
263. 

Liberty,  Paul's  doctrine  of,  38;  see 
also  "  Freedom." 


"  Life,"  Paul's  use  of  term,  208  ff.,  337, 

377- 
Lipsius,  238,  261,  335. 
Logos,    doctrine   of  prepared   for  by 

Paul,  286,  296,  309. 
Lord's  Supper,  excesses  in  observance 

of  the,  in  Corinth,  117,  119,  420  f. 
Love,  the  great  impulse,  52;    the,  of 

God,  51,  258,  277;  superior  to  faith, 

422. 
Liidemann,  221. 
Luther  on  Paul's  allegorising,  10;   on 

Paul's  experience  as  a  married  man, 

26. 

Macedonia,  95-103. 

Mahomet,  25. 

Man,  the  fall  of,  242;  not  naturally 
immortal,  244;  see  "Anthropology." 

Marriage,  Paul's,  25  f.;  Paul's  treat- 
ment of,  40;  ethics  of,  389;  Stoics 
on,  392. 

Matheson,  179,  197. 

McGiffert,  124,  126,  172,  189,  352. 

Melchisedec,  type  of  Christ  in  He- 
brews, 12. 

Menander,  Paul's  quotation  from,  5. 

Menegoz,  253,  271. 

Messiah,  15;  Paul's  conception  of, 
281  f. 

Metaphysical  conception  of  Christ,  285. 

Meyer,  152,  156,  214,  238,  240,  302. 

Miracles,  Paul  as  a  worker  of,  96  f., 
319;  as  a  manifestation  of  the 
Spirit,  313. 

Missionary,  Paul  as  a,  69  f. 

fiopcpT]  deov,  301,  303. 

Moses,  the  veil  over  the  face  of,  193. 

Motive,  the  ethical,  252,  387  f. 

Mysticism,  308,  330,  348,  354  f.,  359, 
412. 

Naivete,  Paul's,  in  treating   the   Old 

Testament,  10. 
Natural  man,  the,  243,  247,  257. 
Nazarite  vow,  the,  136,  154. 


INDEX   OF  SUBJECTS  AND  NAMES 


463 


i/jjuos  and  o  vo/xos,  Paul's  use  of,  180  f. 
vovs,  222,  248. 

Number  of  Paul's  converts,  145. 
Nurture  by  his  churches,  Paul's  refusal 
of,  3,  24,  29. 

Odium  theologicum,  31. 

Old    Testament,    influence    of    upon 

Paul,  7. 
Onesimus,  394. 
Opponents  of  Paul,  the  Judaising,  31, 

91  f.,  115,  123,  136  f. 
Optimism,  411. 
Organisation  of  the  Pauline  churches, 

109  f. 


Paradoxes,  the  Pauline,  232,  237,  238  f., 
242,  328,  379,  385. 

Parousia,  16,  202,  207,  255,  324,  423  ff. 

Parties  in  the  Corinthian  Church,  1 13  f. 

Paul,  birthplace,  early  life,  handicraft, 
poverty,  3;  relation  to  Greek  culture 
and  literature,  4;  Jewish  education, 
6-8;  interpretation  of  Old  Testa- 
ment, 8-14;  spiritual  and  moral 
greatness,  20  f. ;  personal  appear- 
ance, 22  f.;  labour  with  his  own 
hands,  23;  whether  he  was  married, 
25  f. ;  intensity,  28  f.;  intolerance, 
30  f.;  method  of  argument,  41-46; 
style,  48  f.;  conversion,  53-66;  re- 
ligiousness, 50;  consciousness  of  the 
Spirit,  72;  at  the  council  in  Jeru- 
salem, 88  f.,  162-174;  preaching, 
72,  90,  108;  claim  to  apostleship, 
32,  57'  59.  61,  65,  75,  93;  regard 
for  the  poor,  85,  134;  relation  to 
the  Nazarite  vow,  136,  154;  inde- 
pendence of  original  apostles,  147  f.; 
contest  in  Jerusalem,  162  f.,  168  f.; 
and  Peter  at  Antioch,  30,  86,  88, 
161,  369;  as  a  missionary,  69-175; 
journey  to  Rome,  martyrdom,  esti- 
mate of  influence,  144  f.  ;  as  a 
teacher,  179-457. 


Peter,  Paul's  visit  to,  148;  and  Paul 
at  Antioch,  30,  86,  88,  161 ;  relation 
to  the  gospel  of  Paul,  349;  party 
of  in  Corinth,  114  f.;  speech  at  the 
council,  172. 

Pfleiderer,  100,  112,  115,  118,  147, 
157,  161,  266,  273,  293,  369. 

Pharaoh,  as  an  example  of  election, 

405- 
Pharisee,  Paul  a,  5,  14. 
Phebe,  130,  141. 
Philippi,  mission  in,  95  f. 
Philippians,  Epistle  to  the,  97  f. 
Philo,    his    interpretation,     12,    293; 

anthropology  of,  224;  on  the  Logos, 

296. 
Poor,  Paul's  regard  for  the,  83,  134. 
Potter,  the,  and  the  clay,  407. 
Preacher,  Paul  as  a,  72,  90,  108. 
Predestination,  398-411. 
Preexistence  of  Christ,  292,  294,  303. 
Probation,  second,  455. 
Prophecy,  317  f. 
Propitiation,  269. 
Psychical  body,  the,  225;    man,  the, 

242  f. 
Punishment,  endless,  454. 

Quotations  from  the  Old  Testament, 
9-13.  45- 

Rationalism,  254,  259,  263,  305,  322, 

417- 
Redemption,  262. 

Religious  genius  of  Paul,  14,  21,  65. 
Religious  spirit  of  Paul,  50  f. 
Renan  on  Paul's  style,  48. 
Repentance,  356. 
Resurrection  of  the  dead,  15,  451;   of 

believers,   434   f.;     of  unbelievers, 

445  f. ;   Paul's  argument  for  in  i  Cor. 

XV.,  117;    of  Jesus,    117,   268,   272, 

300. 
"Revelations"    of  the   apostle,  57  f., 

73.  84,  253. 
Reward  as  ethical  motive,  252,  388, 


464 


INDEX   OF  SUBJECTS  AND  NAMES 


Righteousness,  15,  51;  imputed  by 
God,  253;  for  faith,  342  ff.;  by 
works,  139  f.,  186  f.,  372;  unat- 
tainable through  the  law,  342  f.; 
"  of  God,"  269,  354,  362  f. ;  a  "  gift," 
357;  ethical  objection  to  as  super- 
natural, 375. 

Ritschl,  269,  270. 

Roman  Church,  composition  of,  138. 

Romans,  Epistle  to  the,  138-142. 

Riickert,  37. 

Sabatier,  241. 

Sacraments,  414  f.,  421. 

Sacrifice,  253,  270,  382. 

Salvation,  Paul's  use  of  term,  212  ff.; 
how  effected,  247;  universal,  454; 
of  unbelievers,  441,  445  f.;  Paul's 
doctrine  of,  251-279;  as  super- 
natural, 320  f.,  325. 

Sarcasm,  Paul's  use  of,  14,  47. 

oipi,  in  Paul's  anthropology,  220  f.; 
ethically  regarded,  222;  erroneous 
interpretations  of,  225. 

Satan,  Paul's  doctrine  of,  19,  241;  de- 
livery of  incestuous  man  to,  37. 

Schmiedel,  37,  115,  116,  221,  227, 
384,  392,  455- 

Seeing  of  Christ,  Paul's,  59. 

Septuagint,  Paul's  use  of  the,  7,  405. 

Silas,  95. 

Sin,  Paul's  doctrine  of,  218-250;  in 
the  divine  order,  276;  not  imputed 
when  there  is  no  law,  238  f.;  en- 
trance of  into  the  world,  232  f., 
242  f. ;  relation  of  believers  to,  366. 

Slavery^  394. 

Sonship  of  God,  215,  332  f.;  a  super- 
natural relation,  334. 

Soul  i^vxf])  in  Paul's  anthropology, 
220. 

Spirit,  Paul's  consciousness  of  possess- 
ing the,  51,  73;  the  new  law  of, 
I95>  381;  as  overcoming  the  flesh, 
227,  243,  370;  in  connection  with 
supernaturalism,  311-341,  371;  the 


hope  of  the   resurrection,  249;    as 

Messianic,  313;  the  human  in  Paul's 

psychology,  325  f. 
State,  the,  394. 
Stevens,  256,  297. 
Stoics,  ethics  of,  385  f.,  392,  397. 
Style,  Paul's,  character  of,  48  f. 
Supernaturalism,    308,   311-341,    357, 

382,  399,  414. 
Syria  and  Cilicia,  77  f. 
System  of  doctrine  not  formulated  by 

Paul,  179,  218. 

Thecla,  Acts  of  Paul  and,  22, 

Theism,  398. 

Thessalonians,  first  Epistle  to  the, 
100  f.;   second  Epistle  to  the,  102  f. 

Thessalonica,  mission  in,  95,  99  f. 

Timothy,  95,  116. 

Titus,  28,  80,  122,  156,  165. 

Tongues,  the  gift  of,  46,  315  f.;  inter- 
pretation of,  316. 

Transgression  and  law,  87. 

Trinity,  doctrine  of  not  taught  by 
Paul,  298  f.,  304,  338. 

Trump  of  God,  the,  434. 

Tubingen  school,  the,  on  Acts,  161. 

Typological  interpretation,  ii,  12. 

ulodeala,  21 5,  285,  333. 

Unbelief,  salvation  of  those  dying  in, 

454.       ■ 

Unbelievers,  judgment  ofj,  441 ;  resur- 
rection of,  445  f. 

Underworld,  the,  249,  455  ;  Christ's 
descent  to,  303;   longing  to  avoid, 

436. 

Unity,  Paul's  exhortation  of  the  Ro- 
mans to,  139. 

Universalism,  454  f. 

Veil  over  the  face  of  Moses,  193. 
Virgins,  Paul  on  marriage  of,  27. 
"Visions,"    Paul's,    25,    57    f . ;     and 

"revelations,"  317. 
Visit  to  Rome,  the  intended,  139,  141. 


INDEX   OF  SUBJECTS  AND  NAMES 


465 


Visits  of  Paul  to  Corinth,  1 20  f, 

Volkmar,  181. 

Vow,  the  Nazarite,  154. 

Weber,  219,  240,  249,  285,  292,  352. 

Weiss,  269,  313,  330. 

Weizsacker,  35,  55  f.,  89,  95,  97,  112, 

114,  118,  131,  163,  236,  243,  304. 
Wendt,  223,  314,  336. 
We-sections,  the,  in  Acts,  95. 
Wicked,  endless  punishment  of,  451. 
Widows,  26. 
Wisdom  of  Solomon,  Book  of,  13,  14, 

224,  406. 


Women,  the  veiling  of,  18,  392;  in 
the  church,  42  f. ;  subordination 
of»  393»  394;  and  "the  angels," 
393- 

Works,  not  a  condition  of  justification, 
358;   required  of  the  justified,  361, 

365  f. 
Wrath  of  God,  251,  258,  260,  268,  372; 
vessels  of,  407. 

Yoke  of  the  law,  93. 

Zealot,  Paul  as  a,  29. 
Zeller,  152,  155,  392,  397. 


2H 


INDEX   OF   PASSAGES  INTERPRETED   OR   REFERRED 
TO  FROM  THE  PAULINE  EPISTLES  AND  ACTS 


Rom. 

i.  3 222,  264,  329 

4 65,222,329,438 

5 138 

9-13 139 

10 20 

II 139 

13 20, 1 1 7 

13-15 137  f- 

14 138 

16 362 

17 161,362 

18 238 

18-20 372 

19-32 239 

20 372 

21-32.. 4 

24 398,405 

32 239,372 

ii.  I 372,431 

2 431 

4 406 

5 ...  186,  249,  258,  406,  439,  442 

5-13 431,453 

6 367 

6-13 237 

7 210,237 

8 249 

9 230,249,442 

9-13 232 

10 „ 121 

II 403 

12 201,  232,  235,  238, 

239,  275,  350,  372 

13 197,  198,  322,  350 

13  f- 321 

14 182,238,372,379 

14-16 232 

15 275 

16 439 

23-27 181 

25 198 

26 197,198 


Rom. 

ii-  27 197,  198 

28 222 

29 222 

iii.  I 275 

1-8 138 

3 404 

5 249,  354 

8 194 

9 252 

10-12 219 

10-19 186 

19 182,  219 

20 252,275,372 

20-28 142,  185 

21 190 

22 253,354,363,454 

23 219,235 

24 253,259,269,352,359 

25 254,269,270,354,377 

26 352,354,359,363,450 

27 351 

28 200,253,352,357 

30 352 

31 138,  190 

iv.  1 138 

1-5 351 

5 345,359,363 

6 363 

7 218 

8 218,219 

9 357 

10-13 20 

II 357 

12 227 

13 190,  335 

15 87,188,285,372 

18 344 

21 344 

22 274,  344 

23  f- 9,  359 

25 254 

V.  I  360,  364 


466 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


467 


Rom. 

V.  I  f. 50 

2 216 

5 197.254,325.371 

5-8 - 396 

6 387 

6-10 254 

8 50,258,259,277 

9 213,249,268,364 

10 254,255,257 

II 259 

12 201,219,225,238 

12  ff. ...240,360 

12-14 200 

12-15 454 

12-19 218 

12-21 218,454 

13 231,238,372 

13  f. 201 

14 238,239,373 

15-17 354,359 

15-19 399 

17 210,241,329,446 

17-19 233,240,244 

18 210,244,256,454 

18  f. 321 

19 234,255,267,446 

20 188,235,399 

20  f 194 

21.  .210,219,241,  272,329,337 

vi.  I 194.  218,385 

i-ii 322 

2 218 

2-4 272,273,366 

3 366 

3f 50 

3-8 142,260,359,414 

3-1 1 330 

4 260,324 

4-6 421 

4-8 208 

5 323,329,349.438 

6 204,  218,  221,  223,  267 

6-8 268,  274 

7 161,202,218,273,385 

8 202,323,324,329,421 

9 273 

10 209,  218,  267,  272 

1 1 ...  50,  200,  209,  218,  329,  349 

12 203,  204,  225,  226,  385 

12-14 218,  221,  229 

13 203,  225,  228,  229,  384  f. 

14 219,230 


Rom. 

vi.  15 138,185,385 

16 205,273 

17 219,362 

18 273,366,385 

19 225,229,396 

21 203,205 

22 50,  210,  218,  396 

22  f. 337 

23 203,205,218,329 

vii.  1 274 

If. 360 

1-5 - 138 

2 389 

3 377.389 

4 88,267,274,361,377 

5 218,231,366,375 

6 195,  206,  361 

7 138,  184,  188,  231, 

238,  274,371 

7_9 218 

7-12 375,398 

8 231,238,376 

9 203,376 

9-24 204,219,230,231 

10 85,  185,206,231,237 

10-16 389 

II 219 

12 362,377 

13 138,206,235 

13-23 248 

14 198,  220,  247 

14-25 227,375 

15-25 ^4 

17-23 222 

17-25 223 

18 220 

20 219 

22 181 

22  f. 248 

23 219,226,247,327,398 

24 223,231,327 

25 219,327 

viii.  1 366,381 

i-ii 396 

2. . .  195,  200,  209,  264,  330,  381 

3 161,  197,  221,  223,  226, 

243,  256,  264 

3f. 320,376 

4 196,  230,  256,  264, 

342,  384,  422 

5 384 

6 73,207 


468 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


Rom. 

viii.  6-17 209,  268 

7 ...181,247,257,375 

8 257,366 

9 »-.35»330,  349,  366,  383 

9-1 1 338 

9-18 142,  228,  257 

10 208,  223 

10  f. 321,355,435 

II 202  f.,  205,  221,  336, 

367,  438,  446 

12 273,337 

13..  204,  207, 22 1 ,  223, 226,  229, 

365,  Z^Z,  386,  390,  396 

13-16 50 

14 195,327,332,366,383 

14-16 371 

14-17 202 

15 35,332,334 

15-17 336 

16 35,327,338,366,416 

16  f. 321,  364 

17... 92,  212,  355,  364,  401,  413 

18 216,  229 

18-33 399 

19 327,449 

19-22 245,  327,  380,  449 

21 217 

21  f. 332 

23 203  f.,  215,  221,  224,  229, 

262,336,401,455 

26 35' 335 

28 400 

29 ...  35,  216,  378,  386, 400,  410 

29  f- 352 

30 352,364,401,413 

31-39 50 

2,Z 352 

34 335 

35 345,364 

38 17,364 

39 330,345,364 

IX.  1-4 403 

I-5-- 138 

5 220 

6-13 403 

8 220 

II 406,  410 

13 246,403 

14-21 404 

^7 246 

18 246, 405,  406 

20-22 246 


Rom. 

ix.  21 381 

22 249 

22-29 407 

24 402,  408 

30-32 408 

X.  I 70,  138 

2 374 

3 347,363,374 

4 185,  190,333,342 

5 185 

9 345,346 

10 346 

I3ff- 71 

16-21 159 

xi.  I  138 

2 409,410 

4 409 

5 159,409 

6-8 II 

7 246,409 

8 246,398,409 

II 138 

11-16 159 

11-33 409 

13-32 138 

15 438 

17 6 

20 159 

23 159,454 

24-31 159 

25 276, 400,  433  f. 

25  f- • 71 

26.  .276, 318, 400,  433,  444,  454 

27 219 

28 257,  258 

32 246,398,454 

34-36 398 

36 246 

xii.  I 384,  387 

2 325,384 

3 139 

4ff- 413 

8 Ill 

II 327 

16 139 

17 139 

xin.  1-7 395 

8-13 252 

9 196,232 

II 433 

12 389.433 

14 226,330,422 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


469 


Rom. 

xiii.  16 196,  396 

xiv.  1-20 139 

7-9 100 

10 439,441 

14 86 

XV.  2 256 

3 ....256 

5-9 139 

18 330 

i8ff. 319 

19 330 

25 137 

25-29 139 

26 134 

27 134,270 

32 137 

33 130 

xvi.  1-20 Ill 

3-16 133 

4 131 

7 133 

20 124,  130,  241 

21-24 130 

24 130 

27 130 

I  Cor. 

i.  I 70,  328 

2 330,366,413 

4 328,330 

4-8 366 

5-9 429 

7 35,215 

8 215,328,438 

9 402,414 

II 112,365 

13 116 

18 203,214,255,454 

20 4,448 

21 448 

23 108,255 

26 33,  104 

28 448 

30 109,  202 

ii.  2 255 

3 23,71 

3-5 107 

4 73,319 

5 344 

6 35,448 

7 320,325 

8 17 

9 325 


I  Cor. 

ii.  10  338 

10-16 96 

II 326 

12 320 

12  f. 73 

13 325 

14 222,  242 

15 222 

iii-  1-3 107 

3 328,352 

4 237  f. 

6 107, 112 

8 389 

10 71 

10-15 441 

14 389,439 

16 35,  197,328,366,413 

17 249,366,413 

21 116 

22 116 

^3 338 

IV- 3. 35 

4f- 438 

5 215,367,389 

7-14 36 

9 17 

12 98 

14 18,36 

15 107 

17 116 

21 120 

23 9 

V-  I , 328,365 

1-5 122 

3 327 

3-5 1 10 

4 327 

5 19,  36,  214,  241,251, 

326,  414,  438,  439 

9 112, 121 

10 238 

13 439 

VI-  1-9 395 

2 441 

3 440,441 

7 325 

8f. 35 

II 352,366,383,416 

12 37 

15 413 

17 330,349 

19 35,  197,228,371 


470 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


I  Cor. 

vi.  20 109,  262,  327 

vii.  1-6 112,  390 

1-9 27 

2 40*390 

3-5 27 

5 18,  241 

6f. 331 

7 26,40,43 

8 42 

9 40,390,391 

10-16 390 

II 391 

I2f. 41 

14 155 

15 402 

16 41 

17 402 

18 107,  114,  158 

i8f. 155 

19 232 

20 394 

21 ; 394 

21  f. 42 

23 262,  361 

24 189 

28 235,391 

29 392 

29-31 17 

32 391 

34 228,327,391 

37  f- 40 

38 391 

40 391,392 

viii.  if 173 

4-6 108 

4-13 44 

5 18 

6 246,338,398 

9 37,396 

II 396 

13 396 

ix.  1 59 

if. 96,  107 

1-5 84,115 

2 115 

4-18 98 

5 26,  39 

9 181 

9  f- 9 

12 24 

15 24 

16 70,  107,  389 


Cor. 

ix.  17 367 

I9ff. 38 

20 107,  155 

23 389 

24-27 366 

25-27 388 

27 216 

X.  i-ii 13 

9-1 1 442 

13 367 

16-21 419 

16-33 44 

18 220 

I9ff. 38 

20 18 

24 396 

28  f. 173 

29 38 

31 45 

32 413 

xi.  I 42,386 

2-16 394 

3 266,  338 

3-15 393 

6-8 II 

8 393 

9 393 

16 42 

23-25 108 

23-27 417 

27-32 420 

30 420 

32 421,439 

34 120 

xii.  2 107,  109 

3 35 

4ff. 413 

4-6 338 

6 338 

6-11 371 

8-10 97 

9 319 

10 96,315,318 

II 338 

12-28 315 

13 107,  no,  328,  412,  416 

25 315 

27 413,452 

28 97,110,319 

30 315 

31 318 

xiii.  I 17 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


471 


I  Cor. 

xiii.  7 396 

12 217 

13 396,422 

xiv.  I Z^-] 

3--' 319 

14 334 

14  f- 327 

18 96,324 

21 182 

24  f. 318 

30 318 

31 318 

32 319 

34  f- 394 

Z1 232 

XV.  1-8 108 

3 218,219 

5-7 59 

6 420 

8 54,66,331 

9 62,413 

13 118 

14 118,345 

17 218,  219,  346 

18 446 

19 427,446 

21 199,  205 

22 100,  234,  329,  445  f. 

23 100 

24 345.448 

24  f Z^"^ 

24-28 455 

■  25 448 

25  f- 455 

26 207 

28 338,453 

29 417.444 

30 420 

32 4,  131,389,428 

IZ 5 

35ff- 435 

35-51 435 

37  f 60 

40 59,401 

40  f- 439 

40-49 118 

42 428 

43 216 

44 -59,  220,  221 

45 233,329 

45  f- 242 

45-49 199 


1  Cor. 

XV.  45-50 218 

46  f. 43 

47 202,  329 

49 216,  221 

49-54 318 

50 212,  220,401 

50-54 337 

51 217 

51  f. 207 

51-54 434 

52 244,440 

52-58 212 

53 205,  210,  220,  401 

54 207,  220 

55 ••452 

56 , 218,237 

xvi.  1-3 135 

1-20 129 

2-8 112 

3 no 

5-8 120 

6 133 

8 128 

9 132 

12 112 

15 104,107,  III,  133 

17 112 

19 109,  128,  130 

2  Cor. 

i.  I 104 

5 ^^^ 

8 128,  131 

8-1 1 132 

12 222 

14 241 

16 47 

19 107,  109 

21  f 109 

22 197 

23 120 

ii.  I 120 

2 120 

3 120 

4 121 

5-10 122 

6 no,  122 

7f. 125 

9 , .  1 20 

II 241 

13 97.327 

14-17 31 

15 203,454 


4/2 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


2  Cor. 

ii.  i6 205 

iii.  I 114,  123 

2 60 

2  f. 96 

6 197 

7 193,338 

8 331 

II 190 

11-13 193 

13  f. 190 

17 194,325,330,338 

18 ?,Z^,3Z9 

iv.  3 123,443,454 

4 19,43,60,221,443,448 

6 338 

7 23 

8 389 

10 23,132,221,331 

II 221,  223 

14 438 

14-18 389 

16 23 

17 210 

V.  I  ft".  436 

1-4 453 

i-io 430,437 

3ff- 437 

4 23,233,336,337 

5 336,455 

6 221 

7 344 

8 3ZI 

9 388 

10 367,388,438,439,441 

II 387 

14 266,  276,  387 

14-21 383 

15 100,  109,  276,  387 

17 109,329,347,360,366 

19 259,  264,  270,  276,  360 

21 .  .218,  264,  270,  354,  359,  363 

v".  I---- 227,325,328,380 

4-15 125 

5 97 

6f. 121 

8 121 

8-12 122,  125 

lo 205 

10  ft".  22 

13 121,327 

viii.  I 387 

If- 104,135 


2  Cor. 

viii.  3  f. 104 

6 121 

9 386,387 

" ^35 

16 121 

18 104 

22 , 104 

ix.  6 107 

12 134 

X.  l-xiii.  10 7,  121,  123,  125 

2 220,  221,  227 

4 222 

5 347 

7 116 

10 71,123 

15-18 124 

xi.  3 241 

4 47,114 

6 40 

7-12 124 

9 98 

13-15 31,114,124 

14 20,  124 

15 47 

i8f. 47 

23-27 131 

24-27 29 

32  f. 77,149 

32, 149 

xii.  I 59,319 

1-4 57,66 

2 20,317 

4 •. .  20 

4ff"-  •••' 317 

7  f- 19,  24 

10 29 

II 125 

12 96,312,319 

13 120 

14 24 

15 48 

20 125 

21 48, 125 

xiii.  I 1 20 

2 48,  120 

6 349 

14 338,414 

Gal. 

i.  I 54,  96,  162 

4 90,  213,  218,  219, 

255,  2>^1^  448 
6 9U402 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


A7?> 


Gal. 

i.  7f 30 

8 17 

9 90 

12 54,  163 

13 413 

14 20,28 

15 69,78,402 

i5f. 50,  54  f.,  253 

16 54,  59  f-,  74,96,  106, 

148,159,275,320 

17 55,148 

18 7,150 

18-20 152 

18-24 349 

19 ^50 

21 77,  151,  184 

22 83,  150 

22  ff. 78 

23  f. 76 

ii.  I 80,  152 

"  i-io 162 

2 58' 78,  164,317 

3 28 

4 38,91,330 

5 89,165 

5f. 39 

6 173 

8 83 

9 80,  160,  349 

10 85,  134,173 

II 28 

11-17 30 

12 80,  85  f.,  349 

13 28,86 

14 172 

14  ff.  87 

16 342,349 

16  f. 352,354,362,379 

17 194,218 

i7f. 87 

19 88,  195,396 

19  f. • 348,361  f- 

20. .  267,  270,  354,  382,  387,  396 

21 69,  185,  196,  254, 

266,  342,  378 

iii.  1 32 

2 35,90 

3 32 

5 35 

8 352 

8-15 321 

10 84,93,262,321,342,380 


Gal. 

iii.  10-12 II 

II 185,372 

12 185 

13 90,260,262,273,275 

13  f. 33,321 

f4-29 94,275 

16-19 32 

18 335 

18-20 192 

21 185,  196,230,246,377 

22 218,  246 

22-24 189 

22-26 ?)?> 

23 181,377 

24 181,184,352,377 

25  f 333 

26 202,355 

27 330 

28 44,85,267,393,412 

29 70,335 

iv.  1-3 189 

2 333 

3 90,  191,  198 

4f. Z33> 

5 92 

5-7 202 

6 90,330,  333  f- 

8 90 

9 33.98 

10 90,92 

II 2>Z 

13  f 24f.,  33 

14 18,24 

15 25 

19 27,33,330,386 

20 33 

21-28 181 

22-27 9 

22-28 32 

2^ 220 

29 20,  222 

V.  I.'... 361,367 

2 155 

3 91,93,  184 

4 342 

5 396 

5  f. 33 

6 396  f. 

8 402 

10 91 

II 93,137,157 

12 31,91 


474 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


Gal. 

V.  13 90 

13  f. 396 

14 196,396 

14-16 385 

16 94,226,396 

17 ••••78 

18 33,94,194 

19 207,  229 

21 335 

22 94,  196,396 

22  f. 337 

22-24 383 

23 94,  196 

24 195'  223,  228,  323,366, 

383,  386,  390 

25 i95»  371.  383 

vi.  2 396 

7 238 

8 211,222,337,390 

II 4 

12  f. 92  f. 

14 267,330 

17 132 

I  Thess. 

i-  I 95»  101.413 

6 386 

8 428 

9 99,428 

10 100,  251,  258 

ii.  4  f. loi 

6-9 3 

7 27 

9 23,  98,  loi 

II 384 

12 216,  384,  402,414 

14 99 

15 135 

16 135.258 

19 70,428,438 

iii.  I 100,  104 

2 95,  100 

6  f. 100 

10  f. lOI 

13 16,380,382,388, 

428,  433,  439 

iv.  1-5 366 

3 loi 

3-7 386 

6 loi 

7 402 

9 100 

13 414,420 


I  Thess. 

iv.  13-17 255 

13-18 212,337,434 

14 100,  lOI 

14-17 lOI 

15-18 212,  440 

16 432,434 

17 213 

V.  If. 433 

2 16,257,387 

3 27,  203,  213,  250,257, 

387,  433,  442,  454 

4f. 433 

8-10 388 

9 213 

10 100,  213,  255 

12  f. lOI,  III 

14 lOI 

23 326,328,429 

24 402 

Phil. 

i.  I 95,  loi 

5 98 

6 382,438 

10 438 

21 348 

23 437,453 

24 221 

28 445,454 

ii.  1 330,413 

4 396 

4-IO 98 

7 259 

8 255,259 

9 98 

12 98,388 

12  f. 328 

16 389,438 

19 95 

25 98 

iii.  2 99,  137 

3 137,330 

4 347 

5 5 

6 379,413 

8-10 349,359 

9 359,363 

10 100 

10  f. loi,  132 

II 438 

12 233,366,367 

18 137 

19 443 


INDEX   OF  PASSAGES 


475 


Phil. 

iii.  20 432 

20  f. 60,  214 

25 204,216,  221,336,432 

iv.  I 98,  loi 

2 96,  99 

3 lOI 

5 99 

6. 101 

9 367 

10 98,  lOI 

13 73 

14-17 lOI 

15 lOI 

i5f. 98 

Acts 

i,  6,  II 425 

ii-  17-19 3^2, 

iii.  7 312 

19,  20 426 

iv.  29 319 

vi.  3 318 

8,  10 .  .313 

vii.  55 66,317 

viii.  29,39 317 

i^-3 317 

9 25 

23  f. 77 

26-30 152 

27  f. 83 

X.  I  f. 158 

1,2-28,35 96 

22  f. 317 

44-46 313 

xi.  1-18 96 

20,  26 82 

25  f- 83 

27-29 314 

28 318 

29 152 

xiii.  2 317 

7-12 159 

16-41 160 

46 159 

46  f 160 

xiv.  3 312 

6f. 159 

12 23 

14 133 

21 159 

XV.  1-35 162 

2 152 

7 96 


Acts 

XV.  7-1 1 161,  171 

8 314 

8-1 1 172 

29 173 

40 95 

xvi.  1-4 95>  156 

6,9,13 95 

6f. 314 

14 96 

16-18 96 

21-26 89 

31 161 

37  f- 97,  131 

xvii.  2.  . 99 

"f- 159 

14  f. 95 

16  f. 105 

17-34 159 

20-31 160 

30  f- 426 

34 105 

xviii.  1-6 106 

1-19 105 

6 159  f. 

18 25,153 

22 152 

23-28 159 

xix.  6 314 

21 153 

23-41 132 

XX.  1-3 103 

2 98 

17-35 160 

21 161 

30 129 

xxi.  4 135 

10 318 

11,13 135 

17-24 136 

20 136 

21-24 154 

27-34 136 

xxii.  1-21 143,  160 

3 14 

25 131 

28 143 

xxiv.  10-21 160 

" 14,  I7»i53 

26 143 

xxvi.  1-18 144 

2-23 160 

20 150 


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